A Citizen-Centric Approach for the Improvement of Territorial Services Management

Monica Sebillo,Michele Grimaldi,Giuliana Vitiello,Antonio De Piano

doi:10.3390/ijgi9040223

Monica Sebillo, Michele Grimaldi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi9040223

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Abstract

In the last decade, there has been a growing awareness that the involvement of citizens in decision making can produce an immediate and positive impact on actions to be taken, as they are the real owners of knowledge about the place where they live. By collecting and geolocating data through smartphones and the Internet, citizens in fact can help decision makers both create sharable spatio-temporal information about objects and phenomena and interpret territorial dynamics. However, although such a role has been definitely recognized, the lack of a homogeneous paradigm for structuring the sensing process, managing the geo big data produced and handling services makes it difficult to exploit such a potentiality. In this paper, we describe a citizen-centric approach conceived to build territorial knowledge useful to provide decision makers with a timely and reliable picture of the status of a given territory. In particular, a visual representation of geospatial knowledge is described, which summaries context-sensitive information about a territory and its citizens, thus improving the land monitoring tasks. An information system, SAFE, is finally presented, which consists of a Web and a mobile component to manage citizen supplied data to be integrated for building reliable dynamic scenarios.

Highlights

There has been a growing awareness that the involvement of citizens in decision making has an immediate and positive impact on actions to be taken, as they are the only owners of deep knowledge about the place where they live
The goal of this paper is to describe the citizen-centric approach conceived to build territorial knowledge useful to provide decision makers with a timely and reliable picture of the status of a given territory
Several best practices for citizens’ involvement can be found in the literature, which spread in diverse domains, from Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) examples in the field of the early warning [2] to the more general-purpose Open Government (OG) paradigm, where the three basic principles, namely transparency, participation and collaboration affect both Public Administration (PA) and civil society [9]

Summary

Introduction

There has been a growing awareness that the involvement of citizens in decision making has an immediate and positive impact on actions to be taken, as they are the only owners of deep knowledge about the place where they live. By collecting, visualizing and geolocating information through smartphones and the Internet, they support decision makers creating sharable spatio-temporal databases about territorial objects and phenomena and help domain experts interpret territorial dynamics by improving processes of both descriptive and diagnostic analysis. This is a founding approach for experts and represents the basis from which every action on a territory should start. Despite this awareness, existing methods and tools conceived to support general-purposes monitoring tasks are not satisfactory, yet. They face, each issue from a unique perspective and, they are innovative, they may be limited by the lack of a real involvement of ultimate users by experts and decision makers during the design phase

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