UrbanData2Decide FACTS

Start

The project started in September 2014 with a kick off meeting including all consortium partners in Vienna.

Programme

This project is co-funded under the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe.

Coordinator

This EU project is coordinated by Austrian-based SME SYNYO GmbH.

Duration

The project UD2D has a total duration of 26 months in which all project partners will contribute to the project's success.

UrbanData2Decide OBJECTIVES

UrbanData2Decide objectives are widespread.

Extracting information
The UrbanData2Decide project aims to extract and process information from two rich sources, namely public social media and open data catalogues.
Creating visualisations
UrbanData2Decide will use extracted information from two rich sources to creates impactful visualisations.
Supporting decision making
The information collected, combined with advice from expert panels, will support local governments towards a holistic, sustainable and well-founded decision-making process which takes into account the views and perspectives of all relevant stakeholders.
Approach urban challenges
With a new decision support systems delivered by UrbanData2Decide urban decision makers can face and approach new urban challenges like urban renewal, urban safety and security.

UrbanData2Decide CONCEPT

The challenge
Cities and urban areas are complex systems and interaction spaces, and their governing officials and representatives are steadily confronted with a variety of new challenges, problems and conflicts. Based on the available information resources, these representatives are required to make critical, timely and well-founded decisions to react to or proactively identify such challenges. State of the art technology and the growing prevalence of the Internet provide urban management with new and rich sources of data with a high potential for innovation and new opportunities towards holistic decision making processes. Open data has been a hot topic in recent years and initiatives have spread all over Europe, producing extensive changes especially in thinking about governmental data and in a further step using it for public and private purposes. Public administrations, as publishers of these data, could themselves benefit greatly from their re-use and incorporation into decision support procedures.

Using the power of Social media
As cities and their residents become more and more connected, user generated content from social media is growing exponentially, but has not yet been fully exploited to understand views and perspectives of the broad public on various issues and developments. Expert knowledge, on the other hand, is one of the oldest forms of decision support, but could greatly profit from a more complete consideration of all relevant data. It is therefore the ambition of this project to develop new methods to combine existing big data pools and expert knowledge into one optimal framework to support holistic decision making for urban management.

Project Elements
Building on the broad data pools in the form of social media content and open data sets, the UrbanDataVisualiser will aggregate, structure and visualise this data using a multi-layered and multi-dimensional approach. The framework will extensively use data mining, sentiment analysis and visualisation techniques and lead to the development of a proof-of-concept demonstrator to showcase the information using intuitive and clear dashboards.

The UrbanDecisionMaker on the other hand will complement this bottom-up approach by integrating external experts and advisors using scientific multi-round expert integration methods and tools such as the Delphi method, a structured communication technique, developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts.