Business Intelligence Tools in the Interpretation of the Ranking of Smart Cities

In the age of Big Data, it is necessary to use various tools to quickly identify data trends, i.e. to visualize large datasets in graphical form. This paper explains the steps of extracting, transforming and loading (ETL) data from various sources, i.e. the use of business intelligence tools in interpreting large datasets for a large number of cities. Three basic phases of collection, processing and visualization of 38 indicators by six dimensions of a smart city for 127 Croatian cities are presented. Data collections were made through web scraping, secondary searches on the official websites of public institutions and through official requests to authorized institutions and cities. The second phase involved structuring, normalization, formatting, data cleaning and the calculation of the Croatian Smart Cities Index, which is the average of all standardized indicator values for all six dimensions of a smart city. The third phase concerned the interpretation of the results, i.e. the visualization of all dimensions of smart cities in Power BI and Tableau.