CitySense: Retrieving, Visualizing and Combining Datasets on Urban Areas
The Ninth International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (DBKDA 2017), Barcelona-Spain, May 21-25
2017
Conference/Workshop
- Contact persons: Yannis Stavrakas , Harry Nakos , Danae Pla Karidi
- Relevant research project: CitySense
Abstract.
Social networks, available open data and massive
online APIs provide huge amounts of data about our
surrounding location, especially for cities and urban areas.
Unfortunately, most previous applications and research
usually focused on one kind of data over the other, thus
presenting a biased and partial view of each location in
question, hence partially negating the benefits of such
approaches. To remedy this, this work presents the CitySense
framework that simultaneously combines data from
administrative sources (e.g., public agencies), massive Point of
Interest APIs (Google Places, Foursquare) and social
microblogs (Twitter) to provide a unified view of all available
information about an urban area, in an intuitive and easy to
use web-application platform. This work describes the
engineering and design challenges of such an effort and how
these different and divergent sources of information may be
combined to provide an accurate and diverse visualization for
our use-case, the urban area of Chicago, USA.