Geospatial Dashboards for Monitoring Smart City Performance

Government Information Quarterly, 2018

Dashboards visualize a consolidated set data for a certain purpose which enables users to see what is happening and to initiate actions. Dashboards can be used by governments to support their decision-making and policy processes or to communicate and interact with the public. The objective of this paper is to understand and to support the design of dashboards for creating transparency and accountability. Two smart city cases are investigated showing that dashboards can improve transparency and accountability, however, realizing these benefits was cumbersome and encountered various risks and challenges. Challenges include insufficient data quality, lack of understanding of data, poor analysis, wrong interpretation, confusion about the outcomes, and imposing a pre-defined view. These challenges can easily result in misconceptions, wrong decision-making, creating a blurred picture resulting in less transparency and accountability, and ultimately in even less trust in the government. Principles guiding the design of dashboards are presented. Dashboards need to be complemented by mechanisms supporting citizens' engagement, data interpretation, governance and institutional arrangements.

Handbook of Research on Social, Economic, and Environmental Sustainability in the Development of Smart Cities

This chapter introduces a range of analytics being used to understand the smart city, which depends on data that can primarily be understood using new kinds of scientific visualisation. We focus on short term routine functions that take place in cities which are being rapidly automated through various kinds of sensors, embedded into the physical fabric of the city itself or being accessed from mobile devices. We first outline a concept of the smart city, arguing that there is a major distinction between the ways in which technologies are being used to look at the short and long terms structure of cities, and we then focus on the shorter term, first examining the immediate visualisation of data through dashboards, then examining data infrastructures such as map portals, and finally introducing new ways of visualising social media which enable us to elicit the power of the crowd in providing and supplying data. We conclude with a brief focus on how new urban analytics is emerging to m...

ISPRS Annals Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, III-4/W1

As many cities increase in size across multiple dimensions such as population, economic output and physical size, new methods for understanding and managing cities are required. Data produced by and about urban environments offer insight into what is happening in cities. Real-time data from sensors within the city record current transport and environmental conditions such as noise levels, water levels, journey times and public transport delays. Similarly administrative data such as demographics, employment statistics, property prices and crime rates all provide insight into how a city is evolving. Traditionally, these data were maintained separately and managed by individual city departments. Advances in technology and a move to open-government have placed many of these data in the public domain. Urban dashboards have emerged as a technique to visualise these data in an accessible way. This paper describes the implementation of one such dashboard, the Dublin Dashboard, an interactive website which collects, analyses and visualises data from a variety of sources about Dublin in Ireland through a series of interactive maps, graphs and applications. This paper describes the approach, the data and the technology used to develop the Dublin Dashboard and acts as a guideline for developing urban dashboards in other cities.

This chapter considers the relationship between data and the city by critically examining six key issues with respect city dashboards: epistemology, scope and access, veracity and validity, usability and literacy, use and utility, and ethics. While city dashboards provide useful tools for evaluating and managing urban services, understanding and formulating policy, and creating public knowledge and counter-narratives, our analysis reveals a number of conceptual and practical shortcomings. In order for city dashboards to reach their full potential we advocate a number of related shifts in thinking and praxes and forward an agenda for addressing the issues we highlight. Our analysis is informed by our endeavours in building the Dublin Dashboard.

Since the mid-1990s a plethora of indicator projects have been developed and adopted by cities seeking to measure and monitor various aspects of urban systems. These have been accompanied by city benchmarking endeavours that seek to compare intra-and inter-urban performance. More recently, the data underpinning such projects have started to become more open to citizens, more real-time in nature generated through sensors and locative/social media, and displayed via interactive visualisations and dashboards that can be accessed via the internet. In this paper, we examine such initiatives arguing that they advance a narrowly conceived but powerful realist epistemology – the city as visualised facts – that is reshaping how managers and citizens come to know and govern cities. We set out how and to what ends indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives are being employed by cities. We argue that whilst these initiatives often seek to make urban processes and performance more transparent and to improve decision making, they are also underpinned by a naive instrumental rationality, are open to manipulation by vested interests, and suffer from often unacknowledged methodological and technical issues. Drawing on our own experience of working on indicator and dashboard projects, we argue for a conceptual re-imaging of such projects as data assemblages – complex, politically-infused, socio-technical systems that, rather than reflecting cities, actively frame and produce them.

2019

1 ABSTRACT Today different sources of information on urban are as are becoming openly available at various spatial nd temporal resolutions and extents. They are crucial for driving towards “Smart Cities”. Many smart city relevant applications, to understand and predict ce rtain phenomena such as mobility, air quality, etc. , depend on large amounts of readily available good quality data. Many datasets related to such topics are alre ady publicly available. However, the appropriate use of these datasets must be ensured by checking the qua lity of data in a systematic way. Under quality of data, on e not only evaluate the number of missing or false data points but also determine data characteristics such as resolution, frequency and ease of use, etc. The refor , the objectives of this paper are to evaluate the op n data available in different portals (80 in total ) with special consideration to these factors and to evalu ate their usability in some of the smart city appli cations. In ...

Journal of Computer and Communications, 2015

This paper illustrates a case project to design a digital dashboard for governing the urban safety of an Italian city and proposes a methodology for the definition of a set of safety measurement indicators. Results show that the method is easy to be used to identify the most crucial areas of the city, in several domains of application that have been identified. The study can substantially support policy makers in the development of their strategies and in the measurement of the effectiveness of their decisions.

Procedia Computer Science, 2019

Rapid rise in information and communication technology in various walks of life has helped digitization of human services, including transportation. The result of digitization is vast amount of location and time data on humans and goods, which in turn provide a valuable resource for transportation system performance for the managing and operating agencies. A wide variety of transportation performance metrics (TPMs) to characterize, evaluate and improve the performance towards making the operating agencies, and thereby the cities, 'smart' must be presented suitably to policy and decision makers. TPMs and data sources are of varying spatiotemporal extent and data formats, necessitating interoperability. Estimating TPMs requires a generic data warehousing framework handling various datasets, preferably, built in-house for the agencies to sustainably move towards smart city goals and meeting federal data reporting mandates. In this study, such a flexible data analytics framework is demonstrated via novel data ingestion and visualization outputs. Several use cases for evaluating efficiency, reliability and sustainability of transportation projects and system are presented.

EAI Endorsed Transactions on Smart Cities

The rapid growth of the urban landscape from natural development, traffic congestion, crime, and waste management has become a challenge to the city dwellers and decision-makers, thus requiring smart and efficient ways to tackle these problems. The combination of big data and Internet of Things (IoT) is guiding local communities in achieving the goal of building creative communities. This study aims to use real-time spatial analytics that integrates state-of-the art ICT approaches with interdisciplinary synthesis for smart solution making process across different sectors of the community. The use of real-time data and coordination of information from multiple city agencies enable policymakers to adjust management strategies in near real-time and can also provide citizens with situational awareness on emergency and nonemergency conditions. Using state-of-the-art technologies, and communication-based applications within the context of smart cities, three smart city examples were developed with the case study of Grand Forks, North Dakota. Using Web AppBuilder, a health resources inventory for the town of Grand Forks was designed with real-time integration of medical information and treatment facilities within the community. For emergency response and preparedness, we developed and deployed a solution that combines information from all the sectors of the city using Survey123 for ArcGIS to collect data and display it on an operational dashboard with multiple visualizations for real-time monitoring of people, services, assets and analysis of events or activities.This operation offers real-time verification and can be an essential resource for team leaders and emergency operations centers. The information collected also provides the flexibility to show layers of information, and task force leaders have a view of their task forces and, consequently, the enrichment of life by making the community safe, healthy, and sustainable.