Improving Urban Mobility by Defining a Smart Data Integration Platform

Abstract

One of the key factors employed to define the well-being of citizens in the urban environment is mobility, since it defines a set of flows and connections that constrain those citizens' individual and collective behaviour. However, the complexity of this activity on the scale of a city makes this a complex problem in computational terms. One of the main reasons for this is the asymmetry of information: different actors have access only to partial or outdated information, and many relevant data are simply unavailable. In this article, we propose a data integration architecture and platform with which to combine relevant data from many different sources and provide the results in a variety of forms. This integration uses semantic technologies, thus ensuring that the relationships among data show their actual meaning and are appropriately interpreted. The resulting platform amalgamates: open data, which is available from public sources; extracted data, obtained from public sites by means of scraping techniques; pre-processed data, stored in public databases;aggregated data, acquired from pervasive devices by means of crowdsourcing; smart data, supplied by mobile applications and enriched with contextual information, or data concerning specific incidents, often provided by the users themselves. The semantic integration of this information makes it possible to compute a wide range of results, from accessible transport routes to identifiable events, in a coordinated manner. The general public is then supplied with these results through the use of specific software, via either mobile applications or the web. We are of the opinion that the collective use of this information may improve urban welfare.