Dambruch, Jens and Stein, Andreas and Ivanova, Veneta (2016) Innovative approaches to urban data management using emerging technologies. REAL CORP 2016 – SMART ME UP! How to become and how to stay a Smart City, and does this improve quality of life? Proceedings of 21st International Conference on Urban Planning, Regional Development and Information Society. pp. 375-384.
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Text (Innovative approaches to urban data management using emerging technologies)
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Abstract
Many characteristics of Smart cities rely on a sufficient quantity and quality of urban data. Local industry and developers can use this data for application development that improves life of all citizens. Therefore, the handling and usability of this data is a big challenge for smart cities. In this paper we investigate new approaches to urban data management using emerging technologies and give an insight on further research conducted within the EC-funded smarticipate project. Geospatial data cannot be handled well in classical relational database environments. Either they are just put in as binary large objects or have to be broken down into elementary types which can be handled by the database, in many cases resulting in a slow system, since the database technology is not really tuned for delivery on mass data as classical relational databases are optimized for online transaction processing and not analytic processing. Document-based databases provide a better performance, but still struggle with the challenge of large binary objects. Also the heterogeneity of data requires a lot of mapping and data cleansing, in some cases replication can’t be avoided. Another approach is to use Semantic Web technologies to enhance the data and build up relations and connections between entities. However, data formats such as RDF use a different approach and are not suitable for geospatial data leading to a lack on usability. Search engines are a good example of web applications with a high usability. The users must be able to find the right data and get information of related or close matches. This allows information retrieval in an easy to use fashion. The same principles should be applied to geospatial data, which would improve the usability of open data. Combined with data mining and big data technologies those principles would improve the usability of open geospatial data and even lead to new ways to use it. By helping with the interpretation of data in a certain context data is transformed into useful information. In this paper we analyse key features of open geodata portals such as linked data and machine learning in order to show ways of improving the user experience. Based on the Smarticipate projects we show afterwards as open data and geo data online and see the practical application. We also give an outlook on piloting cases where we want to evaluate, how the technologies presented in this paper can be combined to a usefull open data portal. In contrast to the previous EC-funded project urbanapi, where participative processes in smart cities where created with urban data, we go one step further with semantic web and open data. Thereby we achieve a more general approach on open data portals for spatial data and how to improve their usability. The envisioned architecture of the smarticipate project relies on file based storage and a no-copy strategy, which means that data is mostly kept in its original format, a conversion to another format is only done if necessary (e.g. the current format has limitations on domain specific attributes or the user requests a specific format). A strictly functional approach and architecture is envisioned which allows a massively parallel execution and therefore is predestined to be deployed in a cloud environment. The actual search interface uses a domain specific vocabulary which can be customised for special purposes or for users that consider their context and expertise, which should abstract from technology specific peculiarities. Also application programmers will benefit form this architecture as linked data principles will be followed extensively. For example, the JSON and JSON-LD standards will be used, so that web developers can use results of the data store directly without the need for conversion. Also links to further information will be provided within the data, so that a drill down is possible for more details. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. After the introduction about open data and data in general we look at related work and existing open data portals. This leads to the main chapter about the key technology aspects for an easy-to-use open data portal. This is followed by Chapter five, an introduction of the EC-funded project smarticipate, in which the key technology aspects of chapter four will be included.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Data Management, Emerging Technologies, Smarticipate Project, geodata portals, Semantic Web |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor J Political Science > JS Local government Municipal government Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science |
| Depositing User: | REAL CORP Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Jul 2016 07:05 |
| Last Modified: | 20 Jul 2016 07:05 |
| URI: | http://repository.corp.at/id/eprint/123 |
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