Introduction

For centuries, physical cities have emerged and flourished by providing inviting economic and social environments for their inhabitants, as well as for their guests, hosting cultural, entertainment, and political activities, and establishing markets for trading goods and services. With the emergence of the railroad, steamship, telegraph, and telephone in the 19th century, as well as a range of manufacturing industries starting in the early 18th century, the movement of goods and people over ever-greater distances became possible in ever-shorter periods of time, constantly increasing demand for public markets to ensure their secure and trusted exchange.

Mirroring this historical physical urbanization, a new kind of urbanization is emerging today, this time in the virtual world of the Internet, where millions of consumers and businesses alike congregate to engage in socioeconomic activity. We are also witnessing a rise in the use of mobile devices and a pervasive Internet-based cyberinfrastructure in the form of large, complex portals as centers of business transactions, personal ambition, and social activity for millions of people worldwide; we spend more and more of our time there searching for information, extracting knowledge, entertaining ourselves, and building socioeconomic networks with our fellow cyber citizens.

It’s not difficult to imagine an environment in the next 10 to 20 years where the boundaries between the physical and the virtual worlds and our experience there either vanish or blend harmoniously to provide a new form of virtual urbanization.

A 2003 report by financial management firm Morgan Stanley [6] compared the growth of eBay to the growth of the island of Manhattan in New York City in the 19th century. Like Manhattan, eBay today offers a worldwide marketplace involving more than 75,000 suppliers and millions of users routinely searching, bidding, outbidding, and generally accessing the site. Morgan Stanley also reports that eBay is fast becoming a virtual city in its own right, with millions of users, coming, going, buying, selling, socializing, and transacting every day [3, 4]. Tens of thousands of suppliers have registered their services through eBay, hoping to tap the world’s vast online consumer marketplace.

Meanwhile, overall e-business transaction revenue grew steadily from 1996 to 2003 [6]; in 2002 it was worth approximately $2.3 billion worldwide.

In the U.S. alone, nearly 300 virtual cities, representing their counterpart physical cities, have emerged over the past five years, formally owned by their respective mayors’ offices; examples include www.nyc.gov, www.cityofboston.gov, www.amsterdam.info, and www.ci.seattle.wa.us. They provide a range of services to city inhabitants and plenty of others, including those wishing to do business over the Internet. Portals like www.yahoo.com and AOL’s Digital Cities (www.digitalcity.com/newyork) can be classified as super cities, attracting millions of users and providing services that allow them to socialize, interact, collaborate, transact business, and extract knowledge.

Interdisciplinary groups of scientists, scholars, and entrepreneurs are only beginning to define the dynamics behind the creation and survival of the next generation of information portals and their role in urban life. A number of these researchers [1, 5] offer a vision of how urban life is being intertwined with the Internet to explain, debate, and even deliver government services, along with more generic forms of communication and e-commerce [3, 4]. As in the development of physical cities, new factors and forces, including trust, privacy, security, reputation [2], information quality, and portal service quality, as well as attractive, easy-to-use interfaces and tools, are being used to win over native infohabitants, along with other relatively casual users and visitors.

These dynamics prompt a number of key questions, including: Can an information city form naturally from a collection of the best possible open source, non-proprietary technologies? Which information cities are most likely to survive, thrive, and provide a stable environment for their infohabitants?

The articles that follow cover the emerging role of information cities and the related roles of advanced portals and markets, social networks, collaboration, contextual and collaborative computing, service discovery, advertising, virtual communities, and Web geography and architectures, including Web services (see www.oasis-open.org) and Grid networks.

Lee Sproull and John Patterson focus on Net-based social networks and communities, discussing how relationships among people living in physical cities are being altered as they increasingly depend on virtual cities for social interaction and organization, commercial activity, and collaboration.

Elizabeth Churchill et al. explore how Web site designers promote and structure social interaction among millions of users, reporting the empirical results from their development of two prototype testbeds—CHIplace and CSCWplace. The former was a Web site that began as part of the CHI 2002 conference to extend the conference experience through discussion of "relevant human-computer interaction issues within the professional CHI community" (see www.chiplace.org); the latter performed the same function for the computer-supported cooperative work community and its semiannual conference.

Donald Ferguson et al. propose principles for designing information city infrastructures based on open standards, including Web services, making it possible for suppliers, buyers, municipalities, schools, hospitals, and others to seamlessly connect to information cities and offer a range of services to participants and outsiders alike. They address the scaling issues that complicate the building of large-scale information cities intended to accommodate millions of users simultaneously. They also address the question of which technology standards are most promising for building future information cities. For example, can open source, non-proprietary Web services technology support commercial activity while providing access to critical public information? And which types of information city architectures are most likely to simultaneously support enterprises, markets, social interactions, and collaborations?

In the U.S. alone, nearly 300 virtual cities, representing their counterpart physical cities, have emerged over the past five years, formally owned by their respective mayors’ offices.

Future designers are likely to turn to Web services, including its related protocols—Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), and Web Service Definition Language (WSDL)—to integrate people, information sources, businesses, local governments, and large enterprises of all kinds. The emerging wireless local area networks (including those based on the IEEE 802.11b protocol), along with other Internet access technologies, already enable people living in cities to connect themselves to information and to each other in ways never before possible.

Finally, Petros Kavassalis et al. demonstrate how natural models of human communication, including word of mouth, marketing networks, and selection, might be adapted to enable information cities to aggregate software agents at information sites in order to deliver high-quality services. They discuss various models of information and service selection by both information-hungry and purely social agents acting in their users’ best interests to select the most promising site(s) for solving the issue at hand. Their selection model offers insight into how cities spontaneously form over the Internet from some critical collection of factors, forces, and user interests, with the help of on-the-fly autonomous agent technology.

All this means we can expect a new kind of virtual urbanization, where people spend more and more of their lives socializing and engaging in economic and political activities. We expect them to take many flavors, forms, and specializations, while offering services involving social interaction, business transactions, municipal services, and daily commerce. Better user interfaces, mechanisms for ensuring trust and security, easy-to-use environments, social computing, and services for collaboration and communication are all aspects of the technology needed to produce stable information cities for everyone’s benefit.

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