Smart data at play: improving accessibility in the urban transport system

Abstract

Human mobility is one of the most important concerns in smart city initiatives and is especially relevant when combined with accessibility issues. This paper describes work in the context of the Access@City Research Project, which seeks to improve the accessibility in the public transport system by using available information (open data, semantic-aware knowledge) provided by transport organizations. However, these organizations provide partial data, and a lot of information is still available only on their websites, or simply does not exist. This absence can be tackled using a playful approach - the use of gaming apps to obtain and update accessibility information. In this paper, we describe the use of a hybrid reality game (HRG) to enrich information regarding the accessibility of subway stations. In turn, the player improves her score, which is included as part of the game. The correlation between these observations is able to provide, in a relatively short time, an accurate description of the accessibility of these stations. In summary, this playful approach makes it possible to recover a set of accessibility data that ultimately provide these smart capabilities, which are the core of this “accessible city” endeavour.