Abstract The field of Smart Life represents a large spectrum of various application domains coming from very established ones as Smart energy and Smart home to very recent ones as Smart environment, Smart airport, or Smart Earth. We observed a substantial growth in the scientific literature with over 126,000 papers containing “Smart” in their titles in 2021. Despite this huge number, we did not identify a detailed classification of these fields in the existing literature. There is still a notable gap in the classification and systematization of these fields. To address this, we developed a generic taxonomy for Smart applications by conducting a systematic mapping study focused on state-of-the-art and research agenda-oriented papers (2341 scientific publications in total).