The proportion of global population in cities is increasing with the current trend of movement of people from pre-urban to urban areas (Bohli et al., 2015). By 2050, 70% of the world population is expected to reside in the cities (Lierow, 2014). The motivation for this mobility is attributed to the availability of better quality of life and opportunities in the cities (Bohli et al., 2015). However, the increasing density of dwelling, utilities, and infrastructure in modern cities is leading to a number of challenges such as congested transport infrastructure, water and waste management, energy efficiency, climate change, and air pollution (Xiong et al., 2014). Today, the Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have become increasingly pervasive in urban areas and are an essential basis for resilience and sustainability of smart cities. ICTs empower citizens in shaping their urban environment and to handle urban issues and co-create solutions (van der Graaf and Veeckman, 2014). Nevertheless, smart cities can be described as the cities utilizing ICTs to enhance the quality of life of its citizens and contributing to the sustainable development (Chourabi et al., 2012). A number of current and upcoming technologies such as Radio-frequency identification (RFID), Internet of things, and future Internet technologies contribute extensively in making the cities smarter (Su et al., 2011; Roscia et al., 2013; Dutton, 2014; Ballon and Schuurman, 2015). Increasing presence of these technologies are causing a large volume of data to be generated (Xiong et al., 2014). Koh et al. (2015) articulated that approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is generated every day and 90% of the data in the world has been created in last two years alone. If this large volume of data, also called big data, is managed and analyzed properly, it can create a major real impact on the functioning of smart cities (Aryal and Dutta, 2015). Therefore, the valuable information drawn from big data analytics is quickly transforming cities into the artificial ecosystem of interdependent, interconnected, and intelligent digital organisms (Xiong et al., 2014; Dobre and Xhafa, 2014).