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The Quantified City: Sensing Dynamics in Urban Setting is a paper tries to shed light on the complex dynamics taking place within cities, which are characterized by a rapid urbanization process during the last decade. One of the main characteristics of these underlying dynamics, is the fact that they involve a large number of actors, such as humans, services, and infrastructures, which are observed in different spaces.
The authors develop and examine the Quantified City system, which strives to address issues related to data integration and fusion, in order to promote and enable an effective and semantically relevant data grouping. Its structure is based on three major components: (1) data acquisition, (2) data analysis, and (3) data visualization.
The system consists of three layer for data acquisition, data analysis, and data visualization; each of which embeds a variety of modules to better achieve its purpose (e.g., data crawling, data cleaning, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, event detection, time series analysis, etc.)
Location, time and event constitute the three pillar dimensions that play a central role in the overall system development. The underlying dynamics are investigated based on these dimensions, using a set of map-centric widgets.
Figure 1: Overview of data extraction and data fusion Approach
One of the most important findings of this paper is the fact that it identifies the need for developing and promoting that kind of comprehensive, holistic-type platforms, such as Quantified City, for elaborating multiple sets of data coming from different data sources. This could be an effective approach to better understand the ways in which cities work and operate.
Reference: Zanouda, T., Emadi, N. A., Abbar, S., & Srivastava, J. (2017). The Quantified City: Sensing Dynamics in Urban Setting. arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.04253.