UrbanData2Decide

Why UrbanData2Decide?

Complex systems such as cities and other urban areas regularly confront city officials and other authorities with new challenges, issues and conflicts. To deal with these issues, governing officials have to make crucial decisions based on the information available to them. State of the art technology and the prevalence of the internet provide urban managements with a new and rich source of data they can base their decisions on. The EU-funded project UrbanData2Decide aims to develop a system that collects, analyses and organises this rich source of information taken from public social media channels and open data libraries. This data combined with the advice from experts will help city officials make well-founded decisions.

Rich Sources of Information to Facilitate Decision-Making

The objective of the UrbanData2Decide project is to extract information and support local government in the decision-making process. In order to do so, several objectives have been determined. First of all, the project aims to extract and process information from to rich sources, public social media and open data catalogues. This extracted data will then be used to create impactful visualizations. Another aim of UrbanData2Decide is to combine this collected information with advice from expert panels. This combination of data and advice will help local governments make holistic, sustainable and well-founded decision taking into account views and perspectives of all relevant stakeholders. With these new decision support systems, urban decision makers can face new urban challenges such as urban renewal, urban safety and security.

Two Elements to reach the Goal

The concept of UrbanData2Decide consists of two main project elements, the UrbanDataVisualizer and UrbanDecisionMaker. The UrbanDataVisualizer is used to aggregate, structure and visualize social media content and open data sets. It uses a multi-layered and multidimensional approach including a framework that will use datamining, sentiment analysis and visualization techniques. This will result in the development of a proof-of-concept demonstrator. The UrbanDecisionMaker integrates external experts and advisors using scientific multi-round expert integration methods and tools such as the Delphi-Method, a structured communication technique.