Visualization Of Urban Data Research Articles

UD‐SV: Urban data services and visualization framework for sharing multidisciplinary research

AbstractWith the widespread availability of a large volume of urban data, stakeholders from different domains require advanced tools to manage, visualize and understand cities and their evolution. During the last few years, researchers have proposed numerous research works and applications to illustrate the cities of the past and possible scenarios of the future under different conditions. However, many of these approaches are one‐time solutions and not based on standards, making them obsolete and unusable for reproducible research. In this article, we present UD‐SV: an Urban data‐Services and Visualization open‐source framework for multidisciplinary research to handle complex processing, analysis, and visualization of urban data. However, our goal is not to present a one‐time monolithic software solution for urban data management and analysis, but we demonstrate the design and development of an open and interoperable software framework driven by use cases from diverse users to solve applied research challenges. The main contribution of UD‐SV is that it uses open standards and open data with documented and reproducible processes with a particular emphasis on the reuse of existing open‐source software components. We also show an enhanced use of standards to enable a shift toward components that are interchangeable or composable with other existing components in the GIS community.

Urban Computing

Urbanization's rapid progress has modernized many people's lives but also engendered big issues, such as traffic congestion, energy consumption, and pollution. Urban computing aims to tackle these issues by using the data that has been generated in cities (e.g., traffic flow, human mobility, and geographical data). Urban computing connects urban sensing, data management, data analytics, and service providing into a recurrent process for an unobtrusive and continuous improvement of people's lives, city operation systems, and the environment. Urban computing is an interdisciplinary field where computer sciences meet conventional city-related fields, like transportation, civil engineering, environment, economy, ecology, and sociology in the context of urban spaces. This article first introduces the concept of urban computing, discussing its general framework and key challenges from the perspective of computer sciences. Second, we classify the applications of urban computing into seven categories, consisting of urban planning, transportation, the environment, energy, social, economy, and public safety and security, presenting representative scenarios in each category. Third, we summarize the typical technologies that are needed in urban computing into four folds, which are about urban sensing, urban data management, knowledge fusion across heterogeneous data, and urban data visualization. Finally, we give an outlook on the future of urban computing, suggesting a few research topics that are somehow missing in the community.

Designing for the Situated and Public Visualization of Urban Data

This paper investigates the concept of urban visualization, the visual representation of an urban environment through its intrinsic or related data, where its display is also situated within that physical environment. It describes how the principles behind public and urban displays can be combined with those of social visualization and persuasive computing in order to create discursive as well as pictorial representations that provide a better and potentially actionable understanding of urban issues to its inhabitants. We introduce the role of several related research fields, and analyze a set of representative case studies, taken from current best practice, academic research studies, and an experimental design studio course to highlight the typical issues involved in conceptualizing and implementing an urban visualization. Lastly, the paper proposes a set of design constraints that typically characterize an urban visualization, in order to guide the future design and evaluation of useful applications within the field.