CitySense: Retrieving, Visualizing and Combining Datasets on Urban Areas

Danae Pla Karidi, Harry Nakos, Alexandros Efentakis, and Yannis Stavrakas
The Ninth International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (DBKDA 2017), Barcelona-Spain, May 21-25
2017
Conference/Workshop
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.