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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005
Competing Urban Visions and the
Shaping of the Digital City
Alessandro Aurigi
Introduction
The emergence of the Information Society has been catalyzing numerous
changes within our cities and regions, as well as setting the scene for many
projects that aim to enhancing the quality of urban life through the exploitation of new Information and Communication Technologies.
The fact that ICTs can allow users to transcend, at least to a certain extent,
the typical limitations in space and time of traditional lifestyles and working
practices, is generating an interest for the social impacts of IT in our towns
and regions, as well as for the opportunities that can stem from the applications of these technologies.
Making wide use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
could be seen as the new frontier of strategic thinking and planning in the 24hour city, as providing and sharing information and services electronically
seems a factor generating huge potential benefits to many aspects of urban
life. Economic regeneration and place promotion strategies have started relying on exploiting new technologies and the Internet. City management is considering the benefits of electronically distributed services very seriously, as
proved by the numerous projects developed in the past decade in many European cities. Democracy and participation to public life and decision-making
processes could be enhanced by the fruition of virtual public spaces that alAlessandro Aurigi is a lecturer at Newcastle University, where he is the director of the MSc programme
in Digital Architecture, a member of the Architectural Informatics (AI) research group, and an associate member of the Global Urbanism Research Unit (GURU). He has previously worked as a lecturer
at the Bartlett School of the Built Environment, University College London, as a research fellow in the
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL, and as a research associate in the Construction
Informatics group at Newcastle University. He has also been member of the Centre for Urban Technology (CUT) at Newcastle University. His main research interest is studying the relationships between
the emergence of the “information society” and the ways we imagine, conceive, represent, and manage
buildings and cities. He may be reached at .
Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, Spring 2005, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 12-26.
Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City
13
low both synchronous and asynchronous dialogue among citizens, and between citizens and administrators.
To support these aims, several technological applications have been considered during the past few years, from traditional WWW sites and Usenetlike discussion areas, to smart card applications and “digital signature”
technologies. Implementation of online Geographical Information Systems
for providing and sharing a wealth of spatial information has been surging,
and more sophisticated ways to deliver place-sensitive information to wirelessly
connected devices such as PDAs and mobile phones are being explored. For
instance, the research and development work around the “3DSpaceTag” technology shows how new intangible yet three-dimensional electronic layers can
be added to the physical city and its places, in order to augment them, accessing the information layer through an increasingly common—in Japan at least—
GPS-enabled mobile phone (Tarumi et al., 2003).
This paper is about the shaping of this increasingly “digital” city that we
live in, but it does not focus on the characteristics of the projects it is made of,
and their contents. Instead, it tries to reflect on how its character can be affected by the visions and interpretations of what the city is, and of what role
new technologies can play. In a way it is a reflection on processes, rather than
contents, and on what underpins different approaches and configurations of
the digital city.
These reflections are based on the critical comparison of information from
different sources, mainly case studies and literature on digital city related
projects in Europe. Most of these analyses were carried out by several scholars, including the author, in the late 1990s, when the debate on embryonic
digital cities seemed particularly alive. About all of the projects considered
had been started and run not by city planners, but by IT officers, local politicians and bureaucrats, who ended up being the main informants in the investigations. These studies provide powerful insights on the different views and
interpretations of the city—and its electronically augmented version—from
the actors involved in shaping the initiatives. It is argued that these are now
more than ever precious in making us reflect on the future trajectories for
digital cities.
The “Digital” City
Many urban implementations of high technologies have in the past been
presented and accessed via an urban front-end information site, typically based
on World Wide Web technology. In the 1990s these web-based information
systems assumed a strong symbolic role for telematics-based innovation in
cities. These were often calling themselves “digital cities,” borrowing their
name mainly from the very well known and paradigmatic experience of De
Digitale Stad (The Digital City, that is) virtual community in Amsterdam. Digital cities—or sometimes “virtual” cities—had therefore been identified by some
commentators as those locations adopting specific electronic models, replicas, or interfaces that would help making sense of the new urban electronic
services being made available. In the simplest of the cases, these were civic
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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005
Internet portals and the information and services attached to them. Other types
of “virtual city” were anyway being developed as three-dimensional models
of cities—or parts of them—and used mainly for simulation exercises, or as
sophisticated bases for the handling of geographical information through GIS
systems.
However, this paper tries to consider the “digital city” as a much more
holistic concept that goes beyond both the information portal as well as the
simulation model. As appropriately noted by Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker,
we now need to think much “wider”: “Where does the ‘digital city’ exist in the
scheme of things? By this time, all cities, whether by design or by accident,
whether in a deteriorating or renaissance state are, to some degree, ‘digital’”
(Gumpert and Drucker, 2003). It is increasingly becoming pointless to label
specific projects—such as the web-based portals—as the quintessential “digital
cities.” The dualism between cyberspace and space, which so much animated
debates on urban futures in the 1990s is gradually fading out to leave us with a
situation in which technology is a much more embedded, ubiquitous, and “everyday” part of our lives (Haythornthwaite and Wellman, 2002; Cuff, 2003).
If digital urban technology is getting less “symbolic” and it is losing its
appeal of a “novelty” that everybody feels compelled to talk about, this does
not imply that it is getting less important or relevant for our lives and our
cities. The processes that lead to the shaping of the “digital city,” meaning by
this not just the web-based information systems, but all those different ways
to augment the city and tackle the improvement of urban functions through
the application of telematics, are more than ever a crucially important aspect
of urban development.
Little research has been carried out on these wider themes, but literature
and research related mainly to the initial phenomenon of software-based, portal-like “digital cities” is still relevant and can prove a very useful starting
point to reflect on the shapes that the augmented digital city could take. This
paper uses elements of the past research and debate, mainly on portal-like
digital cities, and makes reflections that can apply to a wider discussion on the
design and social shaping of very different types of civic telematics initiatives, and ultimately of our digitally augmented urban environments.
Interpreting the City, Shaping Its Technology
The literature and research reports on the “digital city” phenomenon, apart
from describing interesting case studies and communicating ideas and proposals, can show how technological innovation can be influenced and driven
by factors that are social, economic, but also cultural and philosophical. The
“digital city” might be characterized as a series of innovative projects that are
going to change the face of our towns and affect the way we use them but, at
the same time, it is important to consider that the very way we see and interpret our towns, what they are and how they work, and by whom they are
made of, will have a deep impact on how technological “solutions” are configured and run. The way we look at the city is the way we look at the “digital”
city, and the way we develop it.
Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City
15
These claims find a theoretical basis within the sociological approach known
as “Social Construction of Technology.” This allows us to concentrate on important concepts such as the “interpretative flexibility” of the several actors
involved in shaping a technological artifact—which can well be a digital city
project or system—and how these different interpretations can generate designs and policies. Bijker for instance notes that “The design details of artefacts
are described by focusing on the problems and solutions that those relevant
social groups have with respect to the artefact,” and “The interpretative flexibility of an artefact can be demonstrated by showing how, for different social
groups, the artefact presents itself as essentially different artefacts” (Bijker,
1992: 75-76). Therefore it seems important to focus on these interpretations
and what they can mean for the new augmented city.
Through observations and research on web-based digital city facilities, I
have noticed how initiatives apparently very similar, based on the same technological objects and developments, can be shaped and function very differently according to the ways their entrepreneurs look at the “city,” and to what
vision they have of urban reality. I have also noticed how the same initiative
can change its character and functionality thanks to the dynamic changes of
its underlying interpretations of the city and the role of high technology within
it.
Evans et al. (2001) have inspiringly looked at competing views of the city
within the context of the “shaping” of sustainable transport policies for the
city of Newcastle upon Tyne, in the United Kingdom. Examining policy and
strategic documents compiled by different agencies involved in the transport
planning arena, they could recognize within these approaches three different
ways of interpreting the city, and their potential consequences on the future of
mobility in a medium-size British town. They would call these approaches
“The fortress city,” “The audited city,” and “The reflexive city” (Evans et al.,
2001).
Similarly, this paper proposes three competing, though often co-existing,
visions of the city that affect what the digital city ends up being, and its relationship with the citizens and the society to which it is supposed to bring
benefits. The three “cities”—or better, ways to see the city—described below
have been given the names of “machine city of the experts,” “accessible city
of the open government,” and “shared city of communities.” Interestingly
enough, these reflections are also very close to what Beatrice Van Bastelaer
and Claire Lobet-Maris have concluded observing the digital city phenomenon in its early stages and reflecting upon three models of development of
civic networking initiatives, that they called “the control or regulation model,”
“the experimentation or flexible model” and the “open or laissez-faire model”
(Van Balstelaer and Lobet-Maris, 1999).
The views of the city proposed here are associated to very different conceptions of what information, knowledge, and skills are necessary to manage
urban spaces successfully. What knowledge is needed to run the city, and who
holds it? Where does the information, but above all the “wisdom” of places,
come from, and can this be used to produce key knowledge and “solutions”
for urban problems? Who should be allowed to access and modify the civic
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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005
system of knowledge? When it comes to the digital city, what is the role of
high technologies in dealing with this knowledge? And what people and skills
are needed to successfully run the digital city?
The following sections explore different ways to conceive the (digital) city
and to address those questions, and they do so by drawing from existing literature as well as the results of case studies carried out in the cities of Bologna
(Italy), which developed the “Iperbole” initiative, and Bristol (United Kingdom) and “Digital City Bristol Interactive” towards the end of the 1990s.
The “Machine” City of the Experts
Talking about “city as a machine” evokes modernism and what Charles
Jencks defines—within the field of Architecture—as “The overpowering faith
in industrial progressivism and its translation into the pure, white International Style (or at least the Machine Aesthetic) with the goal of transforming
society both in its sensibility and social make-up” (Jencks, 1996: 23). Although this paper deals with implementations of high technologies in cities,
rather than aesthetics, the modernist ethos of designing for the average person
as well as interpreting citizens as the passive receivers and beneficiaries of
any design improvements, within a rather deterministic cause-and-effect chain,
seems the same in both cases.
If the city is a “machine,” urban high technology can be seen as the “upgrade” kit for making the mechanism work better. Urban space is perceived as
functionally very complex—and therefore requires innovative tools to make
sense of this functional complexity—but it is also seen as socially very simple,
so that it can be affected in a straightforward manner. In one way or another,
the problem of making the city a better place to live goes down to inducing
events, preventing others from happening, modifying—by regulation and
control—the behavior of those “live” gears of the machine that are the citizens. As Evans et al. notice in their paper on transport planning, this attitude
towards “control and compulsion” is a feature of the “conventional planning
approach” still very much dominant in cities and municipalities in Europe and
beyond. This vision is also clearly deterministic in nature, and considers fixing
problems by technology as a set of causes that will produce obvious effects. When
interviewed within a research carried out on web cities and civic networks, the
city manager in Bologna, Italy—one of the most prominent locations for urban
high technology innovation in Europe, and the developers of the “Iperbole” civic
network—stated that “My strategy aims to make the machine-city work and be
more efficient. It does not tend to give answers about social cohesion and
social functioning of the city. Those have to be dealt with by the mayor and
the other politicians. However, it is obvious that a better working Council is a
contribution to development and quality of life” (Fermi, 1997).
Most projects tending to deliver ICT-based services in the city, as well as
implementations of IT-based tools to control and forecast civic developments,
usage of space, vehicle and pedestrian behavior, etc., seem to stem from this
mechanistic point of view. And the “machine” can only be understood, and
run, by those who are institutionally supposed to know it well.
Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City
17
The needs of the city, and what can be implemented by the digital city
initiatives to fulfill them, are then defined through a more or less rigorous
approach by scientists and experts of urban problems, city management, and
bureaucracy. As in the analysis by Evans et al., this happens within an institutional and policy world that is kept extremely simple. Few agencies are considered and involved in the project, and often they end up with a marginal
role compared to the governmental bodies. Whenever external partners are
called to take part in any of the projects related to the shaping of the digital
city, this is likely to happen in a subordinate, provider-to-customer fashion. It
tends to be a government-centered approach, in which partnerships exist only
on a commercial basis, or to take advantage of research funds on offer, but
rarely involve an active sharing of powers in the planning of the digital city.
As a logic of control prevails, the initiatives tend to be indifferent to citizens
and local communities, who are seen as the passive audience of what the
“experts” are going to offer them in terms of electronic services and information, or plain regulation of civic life.
Even digital facilities that offer a degree of interactivity can still be essentially one-way and shaped exclusively by a restricted group of technocrats.
Presenting the online Geographical Information System for the city of Turin,
Guido Bolatto et al. tell us that “Professional users would have therefore the
opportunity to search for laws, town planning schemes, urban regulations,
and maps related to their work. Technical public offices … would maintain a
constant contact and be always up-to-dated to the latest changes. The common users enquiring on their houses, their district, municipal services, public
documents, would obtain information easily and for free” (Bolatto et al., 1999:
98). The question here is: who owns the relevant information and knowledge?
Where does it come from? It seems evident that knowledge comes from—and
is managed by—the “experts,” the “technical public offices” that would always be up-to-date, while the general public and professionals alike are meant
to be end-users, or we could say consumers, of the information.
The emphasis on expert control goes beyond the relationship of city managers and the external world. Even within local authorities themselves, the
perspective of the machine-city is revealed by a simplification of the policymaking arena. In fact it happens rather often that the management, design and
decision-making over digital city initiatives is retained by a small number of
departments within a municipality, and lacks links to an overall, inter-departmental strategy of development (Aurigi, 2003: 279).
In those cases where the machine-city vision is dominant, the main factor
for developing a successful “digital city” will be perceived as the need for
employing capable experts, acquiring or producing effective expert systems
and/or models to implement. In the case of the Provincial Information System
of Macerata, Italy, the managers and analysts of the project perceived as an
investment of paramount importance the employment of good technical and
publishing staff, while no mention was made on ideas to involve non-technical actors and the general public (Polzonetti and De Simone, 1998).
This attitude facilitates the production of “closed” IT initiatives in cities.
Many of these are “expert-only” systems for decision support and city man-
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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005
agement that local communities are not supposed to know about, and are run
in the exclusive environments of university laboratories or civic planning departments. Others are public Internet sites that however address only a limited
audience of external investors and tourists, or provide a one-way stream of
information and services through the council’s databases (Aurigi and Graham, 2000).
Other initiatives, such as the omnipresent CCTV surveillance systems in
U.K. cities are developed following logics of top-down control where the
operator of the system can have an overview of the city and the activities that
go on in it. Similarly, research is being carried out on the exploitation of software-enabled real-time control over determinate parts of the city to manage
emergency situations like the consequences of a fire or a terrorist attack in an
underground station. Nakanishi et al. (2003) for instance have been working
on an “Evacuation Leadership System” in which operators can interact with a
three-dimensional model representing the real-time events in an underground
station, in which the information is fed through sophisticated 360 degrees
CCTV. The operator can select the characters on the screen corresponding to
real people—likely to be in panic—and communicate with them through their
mobile phone in a way that is incredibly reminiscent of “The Sims” or
“SimCity” videogames. In such systems, the difference between real people
and “intelligent” soft automata blurs to the extent that the operator could actually be playing a game, instead of dealing with reality, and not be aware of it
at all. The city—and its inhabitants—is seen as a machine to the point of
becoming indistinguishable from an actual machine: a computer and its display. It is not the purpose of this paper to deny the potential usefulness of
developments like these—though the obvious perplexities on the opportunity
and possible distortions of such a strict control can arise—but just to point out
how strong a certain perspective on urban environments is, and how strongly
this is contributing to shaping our evolving “digital” city.
The Accessible City of the Open Government
This is becoming a widespread way of seeing the city and also of what a
“digital” city can do for its inhabitants. From this perspective, citizens have a
more important role, as they are seen as the potentially critical clients of the
public administration, as well as the owners of a certain amount of shareable,
relevant information and knowledge. The “open” digital city needs active
users who are willing to engage in exchanging information, learning, debating, and publishing. The emphasis here is in actively encouraging usage of
the digital urban systems, through a series of computer literacy initiatives,
promotion of the systems themselves, and sometimes involvement of the general public—or more often selected community organizations—as information providers. In the past this has been achieved by offering free Internet
space within the urban information system, and allowing people to publish in
it.
One of the leading ideas proper to this vision is that the local authority, or
indeed any other single agency, does not own all the relevant information
Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City
19
about the city, and that local communities and individuals should be put in the
picture as they can enrich the “contents” and the wisdom of the digital city
and contribute to its improvement and usefulness.
However, this is still in certain respects a government-centered vision. Although government tends to be “open” and sensitive to the diversity of inputs
that can come from the users of the city, the ownership of the decision-making
processes is kept firmly in the hands of one agency, or a restricted partnership. So, while the city is seen as diverse and heterogeneous when it comes to
using ICT services and integrating vital information, the framework within
which all of this can be done is kept quite rigid. Citizens are “advanced users,” or “information providers” in the most open scenarios. They have to be
encouraged and trained to use and contribute to the new IT systems, so that
they can benefit from this and get equipped better to participate in public life.
What they cannot do is to contribute to the design of the system, and to set
the framework and the types of services it will be offering. They are not even
asked about it. Validation of ICT urban projects from the citizens has been
seldom promoted by digital city entrepreneurs. Even in some virtuous cases—
such as the Bologna civic network—when surveys have been carried out among
the users of the information system (Bellagamba and Guidi, 1996), the quality
of what was provided was audited, and users were asked to comment on the
quality of information and services, but the definition of what the system should
and should not be about still was a scarcely shared matter. Features and
functionalities were pushed, not pulled, in response to explicit needs from the
inhabitants. Most of the digital city services provided by even the most advanced and complex projects, are not the product of consultation with local
communities, but rather the exploitation of EC funding opportunities in a certain area, and of the synergies between local authorities and the IT industry.
Projects are conceived and developed, and then offered as a “final product” to
the prospective citizens-users, hoping that they will participate actively in the
adoption of the new technology.
So, the diverse city that is supposed to contribute to the information held in
its digital counterpart becomes homogeneous when its aspects, functions, and
solutions are being conceived and designed. Evans et al., in their paper, refer
to the “audited city” of progressive planning and highlight that “paradoxically the city, which was heterogeneous when being audited, is now to be
persuaded by a single appeal to economic and technical efficiency, which
recognizes none of this diversity” (Evans et al., 2001: 127). This reflects rather
well what can be observed in digital city initiatives that are characterized by
an “open government” approach. Evans et al. also note that “it is almost as if
the authors [of the strategy review document for transport policy] underestimated the difficulty of forging new social networks and communities of interest, believing instead that providing information would promote change
automatically” (Evans et al., 2001: 128). This lack of overall strategies towards the promotion of real and effective participation has been a problem
noted also in observing the construction of the digital city, as involvement of
citizens was taken for granted by relying exclusively on the deployment of
new technologies, without considering the necessity for urban managers to
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integrate these with locally focused, non hi-tech actions of consultation and
promotion of dialogue (Aurigi, 1999: 43).
The type of initiatives that get influenced by this vision tends to be based
on the deterministic assumption that services and information will inevitably
generate new community dynamics and participation. In order to do this, the
key seems to be training and therefore constructing the users. Access barriers
are seen as the only real hurdle towards the effective delivery of benefits from
new urban technologies. Once citizens will overcome problems related to lack
of money or education in IT, they will set the digital city alive.
Conceiving the city—and the digital city—this way implies that what is
perceived as the main problem for the success of technological innovation is
the establishment of a critical mass of active users of whatever system or
environment—virtual or hybrid—is being proposed. This has been the main
concern in many cities involved in cyber-innovation. In Belgium, “Antwerp
has to create access to this information” by providing cybercafes, “cyberbuses,”
information booths, and kiosks (Peeters, 1999), while in Helsinki a parallel was drawn between the aim “to get above a critical mass of users” and
the need “to offer them interesting services” by actually “pushing” them
to this prospective audience (Linturi et al., 1999: 85). A document titled
“The Hague in the Information Society” refers to the concept of a “democratic city,” with “greater involvement of citizens” just as a consequence
of increased access to local computer networks (Boekwijt, 2000), while the
perceived potential benefits of the “digital city” information system in Shanghai all tend to be derived from broadcasting and consumption of information,
inducing “more democracy” that would supposedly be boosted by the chance
given to citizens to write to the local authority with suggestions (Peng et al.,
1999: 127).
But this correlation between mass of users and benefits for the public sphere
of contemporary cities has been difficult to prove, and in some cases it has
been noted (Aurigi, 1999; Ranerup, 1999) that participation to “digital” public discourse has been much lower than expectations. Some re-thinking of the
whole approach appears to be necessary.
The Shared Cities of Communities
When the civic network in Bologna was taking its first steps, in the mid
1990s, the main promoter and entrepreneur who had contributed to the conception and launch of this experiment had a clear vision of what the city was
and needed: “My position stems from the fact that in a complex society it is
extremely difficult to know how the system works, being able to take decisions.... Actually, even in Bologna the urban social system is far too complex
for the administration to be able to satisfy people’s needs. There is a deficit of
resources as well as knowledge. Is it then possible to run and administrate the
city effectively? My answer is no, it is not possible unless we manage to cope
with complexity, broadening our knowledge base and the number of those
involved in decision-making. I am not referring to direct democracy, but rather
to a broadening of representation. We increasingly need forms of self-repre-
Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City
21
sentation, and the Net can allow people to organize themselves beyond traditional structures like unions or certain associations. People can speak beyond
traditional representation forms, and beyond differences in wealth and social
status” (Bonaga, 1997).
Although Stefano Bonaga, a local politician and an academic in Bologna
University, would not go as far as envisaging a totally open process of shaping the civic network, and limit his expectations to an increase in public debate and representation, what his interpretation of the city suggests is that the
digital city should be a “shared,” widely participated space.
This third approach, which is still rare to encounter in digital city design, as
well as in “real” city management, is in fact based on a postmodernist view of
the city as a pluralist system that is far too complex to manage and plan centrally. In terms of local politics, this could be referred to as a governancebased, rather than government-based, vision or, as Evans et al. argue in their
paper: “A reflexive city” (Evans et al., 2001: 129).
The focus here is on sharing responsibility for what the shape of the digital
city should be among many actors, rather than on trying to construct the users
of a mainly pre-defined and centrally controlled set of urban digital systems
and services. The emphasis, according to this perspective, has to move from
the sharing of the contents, which is typical of the most advanced applications
of the open government vision, to the sharing of the processes of design and
configuration of urban technological systems. City government alone cannot
have the capacity of shaping an effective, beneficial, and relevant digital city.
It needs help. This involves an all-round participation of a wide range of local
entrepreneurs, community groups, and individuals in identifying the issues
that need to be addressed by the digital city initiatives and in driving the deployment of the appropriate technological solutions.
In other words, this involves innovating at the institutional and policy-making level, transcending if necessary the existing limits imposed by legislation
and conventional working practices. This kind of non-technological innovation is necessary to really make the technology as effective as it would be
meant to be. It is also a fundamental requisite for the development of e-democracy tools that really can gain widespread support and validation from the
citizens.
The “shared” digital city does not just limit itself to acknowledging that
citizens and local communities have information to provide or things to say
within a certain pre-defined framework. It implies that the framework should
not be pre-defined at all, that urban information systems should somehow
be “fluid” and flexible, and that communities should be empowered to
design their own digital city and prioritize its aims. Within this perspective, training efforts limited to organization of IT courses on “how to surf
the Internet” show their limits, as a much more all-round effort to involve
communities in consultations and decision-making processes would be required.
It has to be acknowledged that we cannot assume that the “shared” digital
city represents a guarantee of improved public participation, and that citizens
will want to be engaged anyway, or in what way they will end up engaging.
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Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005
An all-round effort to promote participatory processes is going to be needed
badly in the “digital” city. Electronic initiatives for regeneration and participation should work in parallel with “traditional” ones within re-combined strategies for urban development (Aurigi, 1999: 42-43).
However, it is worth mentioning some attempts that have been made to
approach digital city-making from this “shared” perspective. Interesting, for
instance is the “Imagine” project, an EC-funded initiative under TAP (Telematics
Application Programme), which in the late 1990s aimed at creating highly
participatory civic networks. “Imagine” was actively trying to “Integrate the
applications in four European towns which have been considered as a priority
by the citizens themselves,” and “put the user at the heart of the service development and involve the users at all stages of the project” (Biolghini and
Cengarle, 1999: 2). Interestingly, when participation to the shaping process,
and not just to the content creation, is seek, social science research becomes a
fundamental underpinning element of the construction of the initiative, as
exclusively technocratic approaches would show their limits in reaching and
interpreting people’s needs, and managing to envisage strategies to involve a
much wider range of actors. In fact, Imagine’s process would stem from a
detailed survey of citizens’ needs, expectations as well as perplexities and
resistance, related to the emergence of urban digital information, service, and
communication facilities.
How Visions Changed the Digital City
Though a simplification is always possible, and different projects could be
categorized as stemming from exclusively one “view” or another, research
seems to suggest that this is rarely the case, and multiple interpretations of the
city coexist, often competing, as their articulation—and tensions—dynamically give shape to the digital city. The problem seems to be that this phenomenon is seldom considered, and its consequences explored, by the practitioners
designing and running the new technological initiatives. Both in Bologna and
Bristol, for instance, Iperbole and Digital City Bristol Interactive (DCBI) were
born out of an approach which was very close to the “shared city” vision, with
Stefano Bonaga in Bologna and Erik Geelhoed in Bristol being the main “visionary” ideologists and entrepreneurs who had started the process. References to the powerful concepts of “virtual community” and civic networking,
to issues of self-representation of the citizens and local communities, to the
potential for debate and public participation and two-way communication of
these embryonic digital cities, and to the ability of new technologies to regenerate local economies from the bottom up, were often made in the promotional literature of the initiatives. These powerful concepts were also providing
a strong symbolic political message—in terms of technologies facilitating local social cohesion and renaissance—that made the initiatives appealing to
local politicians, and gained them a widespread support.
As things developed in the first two to three years of the initiatives’ lives,
the interpretative arena of both projects got more complex and quite different
from the initial one, and started relying on visions closer to the “open govern-
Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City
23
ment” and the “machine-city,” which were becoming more and more central,
and literally transforming the character of the “digital city.” New actors participating with their own conceptions and expectations meant that Iperbole
would quickly shift its focus towards an “open government” and advanced
service distribution facility, drawing its character partly from the second “view”
proposed here, and partly from the more mechanistic first vision. Similarly,
with the growing involvement of more actors bringing in a different outlook,
Digital Bristol would lose its “Interactive” definition, never managing to develop the two-way, public discourse enabling facilities that had seemed to
constitute its initial aim, and getting closer to an Internet “broadcasting” service used by a limited number of agencies and institutions that were enabled
to try and reach the population, conceived more and more as “audience.” This
paradigmatic shift made of it another information portal—rather globally oriented—for the city of Bristol (Aurigi, 2003).
And this phenomenon seems to have been a rather general trend, as suggested by scholars from Insubria and Milan Universities who have been looking at the history of Italian civic networks: “In most cases the ‘pioneer’ spirit
of civic networks gets lost: in Italy, this change is consistent with a corresponding change in the political climate where the participation issues of the
second half of the ‘90s almost disappears: people are more and more seen as
an user of ICT applications or as a consumer of on-line services, while it
should be recalled that citizens own a sovereignty right that should allow them
to contribute in shaping the Information Society” (Benini et al., 2003, original
emphasis).
It is also interesting to notice that in many experiences, while these changes
were already well underway, and the development trajectories of these early
experiments were taking a definite turn towards different conceptions of ICT
use in the city, the underlying claims present in websites and literature seemed
rather unchanged. It looked like as if the initial, powerful ideologies would
resist somehow, though more on paper than in real life. Digital City Bristol for
example would still be presented in 2001 as aiming to become “A virtual
meeting place and an electronic communication network for the City of Bristol”
(Digital City Bristol, 2001). This was being claimed at a time when the views
of the city —and the digital city—had become rather incompatible with a
“shared city” perspective, or at least certainly not focused in that direction.
I would argue that this tends to happen because we, too often, look at the
relationship between city and technology in a deterministic way, assuming
that it will be technology that will impact—and change—the city and the ways
we look at it. Therefore, even if current attitudes towards city planning and
management suggest that the digital city is being looked at through a certain
“lens,” it is hoped that innovation will take over and modify that view, and its
effects. These examples seem to prove the opposite: that the power of our
visions is at least equal to that of technology, and that the relative dominance
of one view over others is capable to affect the shaping of even the most
“innovative” of the initiatives. When we think inside a certain interpretative
“box,” the electronically augmented urban environment we are going to deal
with will belong to that box anyway.
24
Knowledge, Technology, & Policy / Spring 2005
Conclusions
Many European cities are dedicating some of their R&D efforts to retrofit
their urban spaces with innovative electronic tools for information and service provision which, together with the general ubiquity of computing and the
Internet, are increasingly making the city “digital.” These processes seem to
be driven by technological developments as well as sociopolitical agendas
and planning practice, and their underpinning “views” of what the city is or
should be. What seems to happen often is that while our cities are gradually
becoming more complex, multi-cultural and fragmented, the “innovative”
services that are superimposed on them look pretty indifferent to all of this,
and derive their shape by a conception of the city which is more governmentcentred, mechanistic, and technocratic. Most digital cities fail to address some
of the main problems that their physical counterparts have, opting for easier
things to do such as electronic certifications or telematics payment of parking
spaces. This also implies that very often public discourse fails to be enhanced
by the electronic urban tools, even when this was meant to be one of the main
benefits of the digital city.
However, the purpose of this paper is not that of labeling projects in one
way or another—as the history of many of these initiatives is likely to be
characterized by a mix of approaches—or to categorize digital city approaches
in order to recognize “best practice” examples. “Best practice” is always a relative
concept, which depends on what aims a series of projects is supposed to achieve,
how it is supposed to achieve them, and within what context and constraints.
What this paper can suggest, instead, is how important it can be to move
from a perspective based on the presence or absence of the implementation of
new technologies in a city, to a more sophisticated analysis of how those
technologies are designed, conceived, deployed and managed, and what interpretations lay behind them. As Guthrie and Dutton argued over ten years
ago, “Like policy, technology is a social construction.... However, in the case
of technology, these policy choices too often are obscured or overlooked because people focus only on decisions about the adoption or non adoption of a
technology rather than also attending to decisions about design and implementation of the technology that influence its use and impact” (Guthrie and
Dutton, 1992: 575).
As noted here, we might believe that we are thinking out of the box because we are implementing something “innovative.” However, our pre-defined views and interpretations of the city and the relevance and role of several
urban actors will influence the shaping of the “new”—yet ridden of “old”
problems—digital environment. I would like to argue that we should therefore pay more attention to our changing and competing visions of the city,
and the paradigms that come with them, when we are involved in implementing and managing urban electronic innovation. Strategy-making for the design and deployment of the “digital” city needs a constant awareness of the
underlying non-technical components that are going to affect the type of initiatives we create, as well as the overall context within which these will have
to function and interact with the other many aspects of urban life.
Competing Urban Visions and the Shaping of the Digital City
25
Urban technology projects do not necessarily evolve as linearly as it would
seem, even from within the cohort of actors who set them up and run them.
They seem to be subject to an interaction—and potential conflict—of different visions that change their aims and potential subtly but substantially, and
affect the ways we think in terms of information, knowledge and wisdom of
the place, who owns them, who should handle them. “Digital” cities need
steering, and this is not just a matter of deciding what to do but above all how,
and why. This process can be helped by an active involvement of social research, run in parallel to the deployment and technical development of the
initiatives. This can prove invaluable for the “strategic” steering that the digital city in which we are all living needs in order to become more meaningful,
inclusive, and actually useful.
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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3033584, IEEE Access
Date of publication xxxx 00, 0000, date of current version xxxx 00, 0000.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2017.Doi Number
Improving Urban Mobility by Defining a Smart
Data Integration Platform
P. Cáceres1, A. Sierra-Alonso1, C.E. Cuesta1, B. Vela1, and J.M. Cavero1
1
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, C/ Tulipán s/n, 28933 Móstoles (Madrid) SPAIN.
Corresponding author: P. Cáceres (e-mail: paloma.caceres@urjc.es).
This work has been partially supported by the Access@City research project (TIN2016-78103-C2-1-R), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation
and Universities.
ABSTRACT One of the key factors employed to define the well-being of citizens in the urban environment
is mobility, since it defines a set of flows and connections that constrain those citizens’ individual and
collective behaviour. However, the complexity of this activity on the scale of a city makes this a complex
problem in computational terms. One of the main reasons for this is the asymmetry of information: different
actors have access only to partial or outdated information, and many relevant data are simply unavailable. In
this paper, we propose a data integration architecture and platform with which to combine relevant data from
many different sources and provide the results in a variety of forms. This integration uses semantic
technologies, thus ensuring that the relationships among data show their actual meaning and are appropriately
interpreted. The resulting platform amalgamates: open data, which is available from public sources; extracted
data, obtained from public sites by means of scraping techniques; pre-processed data, stored in public
databases; aggregated data, acquired from pervasive devices by means of crowdsourcing; smart data, supplied
by mobile applications and enriched with contextual information, or data concerning specific incidents, often
provided by the users themselves. The semantic integration of this information makes it possible to compute
a wide range of results, from accessible transport routes to identifiable events, in a coordinated manner. The
general public is then supplied with these results through the use of specific software, via either mobile
applications or the web. We are of the opinion that the collective use of this information may improve urban
welfare.
INDEX TERMS Crowdsourcing, Data Acquisition, Data Processing, Open Data, Pervasive Computing,
Semantics, Smart Data, Social Computing, Software Architecture, Urban Mobility
I. INTRODUCTION
The concept of the smart city implies the notion of a better
city: one in which data is gathered in order to learn about the
problems in that city and decide upon potential solutions to
them; one in which there are fewer disruptions, the citizens’
lives are improved, and their experience is enhanced – in
summary, a city whose inhabitants’ well-being increases.
The urban landscape is a highly complex ecosystem and can
easily degenerate into a hostile environment; as this
complexity grows, the general public is beginning to rely on
technology to make it evolve in the right direction. This is,
allegedly, the actual purpose of smart cities: using
technology to solve the challenges of the evolving urban
space, and applying software solutions in order to tackle both
large-scale issues and small-scale concerns.
One of the key factors is urban mobility: the way in which
people move through the city defines their perception of the
environment, the concentration of the population and the
interferences and interactions among individuals; in short, it
is the framework that delimits their behaviour. Urban
mobility is delimited by the combination of pedestrian
routes, private transport and public transport. The first is
mostly relevant over short distances, while the second cannot
be controlled but only restricted. Public transport is,
however, the backbone that defines the flows of people and
goods within a living city. An appropriate regulation of
public transport has direct consequences as regards
improving citizens’ welfare – and in this case, the notion of
welfare must be understood in the most general sense, not
limited to (but including) the economic perspective.
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The use of public transport, as opposed to private transport,
provides great advantages in terms of the entire urban
community‘s well-being. On the one hand, traffic jams, energy
consumption and carbon emissions are reduced. On the other,
new parking infrastructures are not necessary, which allows
the construction of new pedestrian spaces, such as parks and
recreation areas, in their place. Any means employed to
increase the use of public transport and improve its efficiency
have a positive effect on the whole system.
Much of the current research on smart cities has been
related to cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things,
and much of it has, therefore, had to deal with hardware
issues. However, the smartness of the city is, in reality,
provided by the software that processes the data captured by
that hardware. Indeed, on the scale of a city, the actual issue
is that of capturing all kinds of information in different data
streams, synchronizing them, processing them, and
performing the corresponding analyses in order to learn
about the current situation of the city, even in real time, and
decide which actions would serve to improve that situation.
In this context, rather than isolated efforts to process
separate fragments, an integral approach is relevant and
required. The data context of the city is defined by both
stable information and a dynamic status. The first of these
provides structure, which can be recovered from
conventional databases and includes data concerning the city
itself, the means of transport and the combined routes they
define. The second comprises variable data streams obtained
from different sources, and includes information regarding
unexpected events, temporary barriers, accidents and
incidents, or simply the flow of individuals within the city at
a particular moment: collapsed streets, traffic jams or public
demonstrations. Many proposals concentrate their efforts on
finding routes within the stable structure, without
considering the critical influence of temporary obstacles; and
of course, the influence of a certain event cannot be
estimated without considering the remaining data. Both
aspects of this information are, therefore, relevant, and both
must be considered in a coordinated manner, even when
considering synchronization; e.g. an accident may cause a
traffic jam, but several hours later, this is no longer relevant;
a multitude might cause a standstill, but an alternative route
could provide a detour around it. When dealing with a
dynamic status, the timing is as relevant as the place itself.
Moreover, there is an enormous variety of information
sources. Apart from the abovementioned emphasis on
sensor-oriented computation and IoT devices, there are many
other options. First, it is necessary to consider that any smart
city initiative also places emphasis on transparency and on
the publishing of open data concerning the city itself. These
open data sources (many of which employ a form of
processable Linked Open Data ) may vary in their approach,
ranging from an automatic data stream, perhaps originating
from a physical sensor, to more elaborate and even preprocessed data sources, such as the periodic emission of
structured data files concerning, e.g. the pollution levels in
the city. Second, many other sources, which provide
information in the form of an accessible API (application
programme interface), are not exactly considered part of an
open data initiative but share much of its philosophy. Third,
the largest potential source of information is probably not
even these initiatives, but rather the presence of
computational devices throughout the city, that is, the
citizens’ smartphones (and other smart devices) with their
many sensors and their huge computational capabilities. If
adequate software is employed, these smartphones can be the
means to both capture and even pre-process information that
is not accessible in any other form, and provide the smart
city’s inhabitants with the processed information in a useful
form. This implication of the citizens themselves in the
building of the smart city not only defines a way in which to
extend the “sensor network” in that city, but also creates a
crowdsourcing endeavour, which may take many different
forms, and in which each new software application in fact
embodies a different conception. It could even be argued that
this crowdsourcing approach is required for the success of
any smart city initiative, and it should be considered as an
essential part of any complex urban computing approach.
Fourth, and finally, there are the considerable number
large databases that store all the stable information
mentioned above, and this information is the basic mainstay
of the city’s information processing system.
Coordinating all of these sources of information is highly
complex, and in many situations goes beyond what a
computational system can deal with and enters the scope of
the so-called “big data” initiatives. Nevertheless, the
integration of even a small part of these data may have a
huge impact on the well-being of the individuals affected.
Even partial improvements can have very significant
consequences.
It is for this reason that our work proposes:
A data integration architecture and platform, on
which all the data from the different sources are
stored, semantically annotated and harmonised, thus
ensuring a feature-rich integration; and
A set of specific and focused software applications
designed for both smartphones and the web that can
solve specific issues (accessibility, incidents and
infrastructure) one at a time.
We intend to provide a generic architecture so as to
support data integration on an urban computing platform.
This will lay the foundations for many different applications,
each of which will be designed in order to improve the wellbeing of urban citizens and to enrich the platform itself,
thereby allowing more sophisticated decisions to be made.
The key aspect as regards providing this generic integration
is the use of semantic technologies.
The main contributions of our work in addition to the
Services on the move for Urban mobility (SofUR) platform
are, therefore, the following:
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A Services on the Move Architecture (SoMA), which
is structured in three following different subsystems:
o An Open Data & Acquisition subsystem, which
obtains data from the open and public sources.
o A Semantic subsystem, which processes and
integrates data and then transforms them into
semantic data by using our domain-specific MAnto
ontology.
o A Smart Data subsystem, which gathers smart data
concerning public transport and its accessibility by
using various apps developed for this purpose.
A suite of applications that offer urban services to
citizens with the aim of putting mobility in the city on
the move. This suite is divided into the two following
groups
o The suite of mobile applications, which is a set of
mobility applications designed for mobile devices.
o The suite of Web applications, which supplies
information services to data consumers, who will
use those data according to their needs or
convenience, and which also offers mobility
services on the Internet.
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 shows a
review and discussion of some similar proposals, while
Section 3 provides a summary of the different technologies
used throughout this work and related efforts. A detailed
description of the structure of our proposal (the Services on
the move for Urbanmobility –SofUR- platform and the
underlying SoMaarchitecture) is then shown in Section 4,
which also includes an inclusive enumeration of the
associated suite of applications. Section 5 illustrates how
these applications prove the validity of the proposa, in
addition to providing our conclusions and an initial account
of some future work.
II. RELATED WORK
In this section, we discuss some of the most representative
software approaches employed to improve citizens’ wellbeing as regards urban mobility. Firstly, we examine how,
within the framework of smart cities, urban mobility is
considered to be one of the factors affecting that well-being.
The term smart city has been used for over two decades
[3]. Numerous definitions have been proposed during this
period; however, while they have commonalities, they also
differ in some respects. Choubariet al [27] and Albino et al
[3] present a compilation of these definitions.
Some authors consider that the defining characteristic of
a smart city is the use of ICTs when applied to citizens' daily
lives [43][44][82]. This implies that it is necessary to collect
data by means of sensors, meters, appliances, personal
devices, or similar, in order to later integrate them and,
through their use, provide citizens with services and assist
them to make informed decisions. But a different trend has
recently appeared, which claims that other relevant aspects
are required in order to consider a city as a smart city. Of the
definitions mentioned above [27][3], some include not only
ICTs, but also aspects such as sustainability and liveability.
There is currently a tendency to consider that a
multidisciplinary approach is required [53] in order to make
the transition to a smart city.
In this respect, several authors have drawn up lists of
dimensions in order to determine which aspects actually
constitute a smart city [27][3][40][60][54]. Although each
list contains different dimensions, there are several in
common, such as people (human), social aspects, the
economy, mobility, quality of life or the natural environment
and technology.
Within the framework of smart cities and in line with the
objective of improving the quality of citizens’ lives, it is
worth emphasizing the need to improve urban mobility, as
mentioned in the introduction. In their definition of a smart
city, Giffinger et al [40] mention mobility as a basic element
to be taken into account during its construction. Washburn et
al [82] also confirm the need to make services such as
transport more efficient, and this is directly related to
citizens’ mobility. Albino et al [3] state that "high-quality
and more efficient public transport that responds to
economic needs and connects labour with employment is
considered a key element for city growth". Lombardi et al.
[51] also opine that smart mobility is a basic component of a
smart city.
Indeed, urban mobility has, in recent years, become an
object of study in an attempt to improve it in order to increase
citizens’ well-being [77]. One of the main aspects of this
well-being is public transport. The European Union has
funded numerous projects in order to address this issue
[35][1]. These projects develop infrastructures with which to
improve public transport and make it more comfortable and
more accessible to all, and they incorporate the use of
information technologies (IT) to make public transport more
efficient and effective and to ensure that its use is a more
pleasant experience.
In this last respect, several software applications have
been developed that inform users about the public transport
network and how to use it. These applications provide
information about the lines, stops, accesses, etc. of the
different means of public transport. Almost all of them
provide the user with the possibility of requesting a route
(optimal in terms of time or distance) from an origin point to
a destination point. In some cases, they include information
about accessibility features, or elements for people with
special needs or disabilities. When considering the
importance that people and social aspects acquire in the
general context and conception of smart cities, it should not
be forgotten that an essential feature must be the inclusion of
all social groups by overcoming barriers of language,
culture, education and disabilities [3][53]. Taking
accessibility into account is, therefore, essential if people
with special needs are to be provided with a good experience
as regards the use of public transport. Several pieces of
software use crowdsourcing to gather data about public
transport. The information collected is then made available
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to other users in order to improve the responses that citizens
attain from these applications.
Those applications that take aspects of accessibility into
account usually focus on a particular type of impairment or
group of people. Wheelmate [84] or WheelMap [83]
consequently provide information regarding wheelchair
accessibility for many places in 45 countries. In addition,
users can modify the degree of accessibility of registered
places or mark new ones. Cardonha et al. [23] have
developed an application that enables users to incorporate
accessibility information so as to collaborate in the creation
of accessibility maps. Access Map [1] helps people with
mobility needs to plan an accessible route in the city of
Seattle. These applications consider only mobility
limitations. Others, such as Landmark Ontology for Hiking
[71], are intended for elderly people. In this case, the
application aids them to walk less when hiking. There are
also applications that consider other types of special needs,
one of which is “CiudadesPatrimonio de la Humanidad”
[15], a web application that provides accessibility
information concerning tourist routes in World Heritage
cities. This information refers to mobility needs, in addition
to others related to vision and hearing. These applications are
not, however, generally customisable: their users can
establish the place to which they wish to go, but cannot
establish what their accessibility needs are.
As stated above, the European Union is making a great
effort to improve public transport [35], and it is necessary to
highlight two projects that focus on the use of IT to improve
mobility on urban public transport: ACCESS 2 ALL [2] and
Mediate [55]. ACCESS 2 ALL exhaustively analyses users’
possible needs with respect to public transport. By taking
these needs into account, it establishes guidelines to ensure
that urban public transport is accessible to all
citizens. Moreover, it proposes customised services for route
guidance. The Mediate Project [52] has identified a set of
measures with which to describe the degree of accessibility
of a particular means of transport and has developed an
application with which to quantify it. Another result of
Mediate Project has been a Good Practice Guide for
accessibility. These two projects seek to establish a
theoretical framework that will cover all aspects of citizens’
mobility, but do not provide solutions in the form of user
applications.
Another aspect that qualifies smart mobility is the use of
data [47]. In order to achieve actual smart mobility, services
have to rely on a lot of information: not only a certain amount
of data, but also a significant amount of variety. For effective
mobility, these data must be up-to-date, and in many cases,
real-time information is required. A paradigmatic example is
the communication of incidents in the public transport
network. If an application calculates an accessibility route,
but, for example, the recommended lift does not work, then
the route is not useful for the user. In order to obtain this
information in real time, it is possible to take advantage of
the widespread use of smartphones and encourage the users
themselves to provide pieces of this incident information
when they encounter them. This is referred to as
crowdsourcing. There are also applications that use
crowdsourcing to improve urban public transport. For
example, Tiramisu Transit [85] tells the user whether there
is room left for a wheelchair on a bus or how full that bus is.
Moovit [59], meanwhile, provides information about the
status of each service, calculates routes and indicates when
to get off. The OneBusAway [33] project consists of a set of
tools whose intention is, among other goals, to comply with
the bus schedules or to decrease waiting times in order to
increase well-being on urban public transport. This objective
can be extended to other transit systems. In addition,
OneBusAway permits users to make comments about these
tools. Swiftly [75] provides more accurate vehicle arrival
data for transport agencies, thus enabling them to provide
their users with better information and allow them to better
plan their journeys.
Other initiatives that use crowdsourcing are the BUSUP
project [14] and the CIVITAS initiative [24]. The former
allows users to book crowdsourced buses on demand, while
CIVITAS is an initiative from the EU to promote a new
urban mobility culture. One of its mobility strategies
includes safe and secure transport for all users, taking into
account a variety of needs [35]. In the CIVITAS initiative,
several pilot projects are being deployed in European cities
to test new accessibility concepts, such as smart access
facilities for wheelchairs [35].
OpenTripPlanner (OTP) [63] is a project that calculates
routes combining different transit systems, including
bicycles and walking routes, and takes (transport)
accessibility into account. OTP obtains data from
OpenStreetMap [64] and GTFS (General Transit Feed
Specification) feeds [41].
As will be noted, there are numerous approaches with
which to improve users’ well-being when they use urban
public transport. However, to the best of our knowledge,
none of them considers the calculation of routes by taking
the accessibility features for any type of need into account or
maintains real time data concerning temporary incidents (a
lift does not work, there is work taking place that hinders
blind people, etc.) in the public transport network.
It is now necessary to discuss the need for data with which
to provide intelligent urban public transport. These data
originate from heterogeneous sources, including data
scattered on the Web in several formats or data originating
from portable devices (e.g., smartphones) [50]. In order to
obtain greater benefit from existing data, they should be
published in a coordinated manner, harmonised and linked,
thus uniting the efforts of public and private initiatives. The
management, maintenance and publication of data have,
therefore, become a growing challenge. Several initiatives
have, however, been set up to meet this challenge, some of
which consist of governmental data portals based on CKAN
[25]. CKAN is a data management system that facilitates the
publishing and sharing of data. Other works present
platforms on which to manage, link or publish data from
different sources, e.g., QuerioCity [52], AECIS [36], the
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proposal by Bischof et al. [12] or ATIS [7]. Some proposals
develop more comprehensive frameworks covering several
stages of the data publication process, such as Santos et al.’s
process [70], the VIVO approach [81], the linked data platform
LinkedLab [30], the CITIESData framework [50] or
CityPulse [65]. All of them handle data from different
domains, but none of them focuses on public transport data
and less still on the accessibility of public transport. Several
works can also be found in the domain of urban public
transport. The proposal by Schlingensiepen et al. consists of
designing a framework for autonomic transport in the smart
city environment, but it is for transport in general [72]. Ning
et al. present a control system for urban rail based on
artificial systems, considering human factors in order to
improve the experience during the use of urban rail, but it is
not intended to allow users to personalise the use of the data
[61]. However, Lau and Ismail’s framework employs a
crowdsourcing approach to provide passengers with real
time data in order to meet their needs [49]. But once again,
nothing about accessibility is mentioned.
We can conclude that there are many works in the area of
smart technologies whose objective is to improve urban
mobility so as to increase the well-being of citizens, but that
there is still much to be done, especially as regards
accessibility, if urban mobility is to be accessible to all.
Table 1 summarises the related work. This table presents
the issues analysed in this work in order to improve urban
mobility and, therefore, the well-being of the citizens in the
context of intelligent cities.
Definition and
characterization of
smart cities
Definition of
dimensions in order
to characterise a
smart city
Urban mobility as a
factor in the wellbeing of the citizens
in a smart city
The role of public
transport in urban
mobility
Albino et al. [3]
Choubari et al. [27]
Hall [43]
Harrison et al. [44]
Lytras and Visvizi[53]
Washburn et al. [82]
Albino et al. [3]
Choubari et al. [27]
Giffinger et al. [40]
Lytras, Visvizi and Sarirete[54][53]
Nam and Pardo [60]
Albino et al. [3]
Giffinger et al. [40]
Lombardi et al. [51]
Washburn et al. [82]
Tomaszewska and Florea[77]
Accessmap. [Online]. Available:
https://www.accessmap.io.[1]
Gaggi,Fluhrer and T. Janitzek
[35]
Accessmap. [Online]. Available:
https://www.accessmap.io.[1]
ICT applications
with which to
improve the
experience of using
public transport
Access2All [2]
Ciudades Patrimonio [15]
Cardonha et al. [23]
Mediate [55]
OpenTripPlanner[63]
Sarjakoski et al. [71]
Wheelmap[83]
Wheelmate[84]
Collection
(crowdsourcing)
The need for data in
order to provide
intelligent urban
mobility
Publication and
harmonization
BUSUP [14]
CIVITAS [24]
Ferris et al. [33]
Lau and Ismail [49]
Swiftly [75]
Zimmermanet al.
[85]
Bischof et al. [12]
CKAN
¡Error!
No se encuentra
el origen de la
referencia.
Darari et al. [30]
Gandon et al.[36]
Liu et al. [50]
López et al. [52]
Puiu et al. [65]
Santos et al. [70]
VIVO [81]
TABLE 1. Related work classified by issues related to urban mobility in
smart cities
III. RELATED TECHNOLOGIES
The work described herein was carried out using various
technologies. The most important technologies used to gather
and harmonise data and to develop the server are described
below.
A. WEB SCRAPING
Data are scattered on the Web, distributed on many different
sites. Furthermore, they have different formats that are
structured to a greater or lesser extent. Data can appear as plain
text or organised in html tables. It is possible to download files
containing data in XML or JSON format or to invoke APIs
that also provide files containing data in those or other formats.
For these data to be useful, they have to be collected, related
to each other and given a common format.
Web scraping solves that need by obtaining data from the
Internet. It consists of gathering data automatically (from the
Internet) by using programmes (denominated as bots or
scrapers) that query a web server, request data, parse those
data to extract the information required and store them for their
later use [57].
There is a variety of programming techniques,
programming languages and libraries with which to attain the
data distributed on the web. One of these languages is Python
[65]. Several modules can be used to programme a scraper.
Three of the most frequently used are [42]:
- The requests library [69], which is a wrapper over
the urllib Python library whose goal is to handle the
HTTP requests. Its use is recommended by the Python
3 documentation, since it is friendlier than urllib
[67].
- The Beautiful Soup library [9] helps to extract the
information of interest from HTML or XML files. It
can be used with different parsers depending on the
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format to be analysed. This library provides a function
that creates a tree from the HTML or XML file. Each
node in this tree contains a tag. These tags, which
contain the information of interest, are searched by
means of other functions, also provided by the library.
Once the tag is located in the tree, its contents are
extracted.
- Scrapy [73] is a more powerful framework than
Beautiful Soup and can be scaled, but is more difficult
to use. Scrapy [48] is an open source framework with
which to extract data from websites using XPath [26].
It offers the tools for the efficient extraction of
unstructured data that are scattered throughout the web,
their processing and their storage in the structure and
format required [48].
Scraped data are integrated using several formats, mainly
XML, JSON or CSV.
B. SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES
In this subsection, we introduce the various semantic
technologies that are necessary to understand our work.
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a model for
data interchange on the Web [68]. In the RDF, data are
described as a set of triples. A triple is formed of three
components: a subject, a predicate and an object. The subject
is a resource that is related to an object by means of a predicate.
The object can be another resource or a literal. The predicate
can describe a relationship between the subject and object or a
property of the subject [29].
In order for the data of which the triples are formed to be
referenced, the RDF identifies each component of the triple
with a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) [11]. The set of
triples can be represented graphically as a graph (an RDF
Graph) on which subjects and objects are nodes and predicates
are represented with edges. For all the users of that data to be
able to interpret the predicate in the same way, the use of
standard vocabularies is recommended, since they will allow
the definition of the predicates of the triples. Finally, the RDF
graph is serialised to enable computers to handle data. One of
the most frequently used notations is RDF-XML [36], which
is based on an XML format, while SPARQL is used to recover
data from an RDF model [62].
SPARQL is an RDF graph query language that has been
standardised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
[62]. The use of SPARQL allows the definition of queries,
which search for data in the RDF graph that satisfy the
conditions of that query. It is a key technology in the
development of the semantic web, since the data structured in
RDF format could not otherwise be accessed. A SPARQL
query recoveries RDF sentences, that is, triples. As with SQL,
it is necessary to distinguish between the query language and
the engine for data storage and retrieval. There are
consequently several implementations of SPARQL that are
generally linked to different technologies.
One of these implementations is Apache FUSEKI [34],
which forms part of the Apache Jena project. It is a SPARQL
server and provides the means to recover and update data from
a JENA repository using SPARQL.
Apache JENA [4] is a free and open source Java framework
that is employed to build applications and which accesses the
Semantic Web and Linked Data. JENA is used to define an
RDFS [13] so as to describe the underlying relationships that
exist between data on the RDF graph. JENA provides a set of
functions and services in which to store, extract and publish
data as RDF triples that comply with the RDF schema.
RML (the RDF Mapping Language) is a general language
that permits the definition of rules with which to map
heterogeneous data sources onto RDF graphs [31]. Mapping
rules are defined in order to transform data from, for example,
XML, JSON and CSV formats into the RDF. The rules
expressed by means of RML transform heterogeneous data
structures into an RDF data model. These rules transform the
data format by defining new triples, semantically annotated
with the vocabularies (ontologies) specific to the data domain,
and integrate those triples into RDF graphs already defined in
the same domain. The rules can be defined from any data
source, in formats as diverse as CSV, HTML, XML, or even a
format similar to that of relational databases. The result of
applying the rules is a set of RDF triplets that uses the
predicates and vocabulary types of the domain.
C. DATA PROCESSING TECHNOLOGIES
In this subsection, we introduce the various technologies
related to our proposal.
Apache Kafka [5] is a stream-processing software platform.
It implements a “publish/subscribe” message system, is
scalable and distributed and provides a valuable platform on
which to process streaming data between applications.
Apache NiFi [6] is an easy-to-use, powerful and reliable
system with which to process and distribute data. It makes it
possible to automate the movement of data between different
systems quickly, easily and securely. It can load data from
different sources, and has a very powerful web interface that
allows its users to visually design the data flow, act on the
process and monitor that process.
MongoDB [58] is a scalable, flexible and distributed
document database. It stores data in JSON-like documents,
thus making data integration easier and faster. Searches can be
carried out by means of fields, range queries, regular
expressions or JavaScript functions. It supports field indexing
and real time aggregation. MongoDB provides great
availability in the form of replica sets. It can run on multiple
servers, and balances the load or duplicates data in order to
keep the system up and running in the case of failure.
C. WEB INTEGRATION TECHNOLOGY
In this subsection, we introduce the various technologies that
are necessary for web integration.
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Spring Boot [74] is a framework that is used to develop
applications in Java. It provides a set of tools in order to
configure and programme applications on any platform. The
use of Spring Boot allows the programmer to focus only on
the solution and forget about the complex tasks of
configuration in terms of data access, security,
communications, etc.
Apache Tomcat [7] is open source software that permits
web applications to be deployed in an integrated manner by
sharing the same subsystem. Some of our applications are
directly run on top of Tomcat and do not, in these cases,
employ Spring.
IV. SERVICES ON THE MOVE FOR URBAN MOBILITY
As stated in the related work section, several solutions
regarding how to deal with these issues already exist but, to
the best our knowledge, there is no comprehensive solution
that solves most of the known problems from a single
perspective.
Our Services on the move for Urban mobility (SofUR)
platform defines a set of services whose objective is to
improve the mobility of all the citizens in a city by promoting
the use of public transport. This results in an improved quality
of life and welfare in cities with regard to air quality, the flow
of traffic, etc.
We have, therefore, developed a service-based architecture
and a suite of software applications, which together comprise
the aforementioned platform. The Services on the Move
Architecture (SoMA) is structured in three different
subsystems that carry out acquisition, processing and
integrating activities with data obtained from crowdsourcing,
public and opensources and that provide enriched information
in the form of semantic data. The suite of software applications
offers different urban mobility information services obtained
from these semantic data for both citizens and data consumers
and, in some cases, also provides smart data by means of
crowdsourcing techniques.
In the following subsections, we first describe the Services
on the Move architecture, after which we specify the different
subsystems in which our proposal is structured. Finally, we
present the suite of applications developed that offers a set of
services to citizens and data consumers in order to improve
public transport users’ well-being.
A. SERVICES ON THE MOVE ARCHITECTURE
As mentioned above, this work is being developed with the
aim of providing public transport and its corresponding
accessibility information. We, therefore, acquire data
concerning public transport from different open and public
sources, after which we process the data obtained. We then
integrate and enrich them, and finally, we transform these data
into semantic data.
In order to carry out these activities, we have designed an
extensible structure, the Services on the Move Architecture
(SoMA), which is composed of three subsystems. The first,
denominated as the Open Data & Acquisition subsystem, is
responsible for obtaining data from the open and public
sources, while the second, the Semantic subsystem, processes
and integrates data and then transforms them into semantic
data by using our domain-specific MAnto ontology. The third,
denominated as the Smart Data subsystem, gathers smart data
concerning public transport and its accessibility by using
various apps developed for this purpose, and those data are
then sent to the Semantic subsystem in order to transform them
into semantic data.
Fig. 1 shows the general structure of the SofUR proposal
and, within it, our SoMAarchitecture, in which the abovementioned subsystems are represented. Each of these
subsystems will be explained in greater detail in subsections
B, C and D. The figure also includes the suite of apps (mobility
and web apps), which will be explained in subsection E, and
which are an integral part of the SofUR platform.
FIGURE 1. SofUR Platform.
B. OPEN DATA & ACQUISITION SUBSYSTEM
The Open Data & Acquisition (ODA) subsystem is
responsible for processing information obtained from public
sources and open data related to the public transport
infrastructure and its corresponding accessibility features. Fig.
2 shows the details of this subsystem.
The first kinds of sources are public information sources, in
which interesting public transport data are usually scattered on
the Web and distributed on many different sites. All these data
are collected through the use of web scraping techniques and
we have, therefore, programmed several scrapers using the
Python language. The Scrapy [73] and Beautiful Soup [9]
libraries, mentioned above, are used to access the websites,
and to seek and extract data of interest. We focus on the data
extraction and processing of the existing information on the
web concerning public transport, along with its accessibility,
by means of a method for the semi-automatic generation of a
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data scraper for the public transport domain. This method
allows the extraction of public transport data and the existing
accessibility information from a selected website. Moreover,
we have developed a web tool that applies the aforementioned
method in order to generate a data scraper for the public
transport domain [80]. The data collected are organised and
related according to an underlying domain model, in this case
a public transport domain model, which was described in
detail in [80]. Finally, we convert them into a structured data
file with a common format (usually JSON or CSV) and these
files are transferred to the Semantic Subsystem.
subsystems, converting them into RDF graphs by means of
programmatic (Java) processing or, more recently, RML
transformations, and then storing them in the Jena repository.
The Jena repository is a single repository, but it stores two
different data collections: the public transport & accessibility
collection and the incidents collection. Details of the SEM
subsystem are provided in Fig. 3.
FIGURE 3. Semantic Subsystem.
FIGURE 2. Open Data & Acquisition Subsystem.
The second kinds of sources are open data sources, which
provide open access to public transport data, either through an
API service, or by directly downloading data files. Each
source provides data in a different format (CSV, XML, KML)
and with diverse internal structures, but all of them must
satisfy the constraints of a domain model. In many cases,
sources offer open transport data as CSV files by following
GTFS. Those open data files can be processed generically,
because they have the same structure as that shown in [21].
With regard to the sources without a GTFS structure, it is
necessary to process each one of them in a specific way in
order to seek the information of interest, which is specified in
the domain model, and taking the particular structure of each
source into account. We process sources of both types by
means of Java and Python programmes in order to extract the
specific data required for our purpose. The main reason for
using Java was initially that we had more experience with this
language, and also owing to its expressive power. We have
since used Python more frequently, essentially owing to its
readability, simplicity [45] and the availability of libraries.
Finally, we convert them into a structured data file with a
common format (usually JSON and/or CSV, depending on the
origin) and send it to the Semantic Subsystem.
C. SEMANTIC SUBSYSTEM
The Semantic (SEM) subsystem is responsible for processing
structured data files from the ODA and Smart Data (SMD)
The SEM subsystem applies an ontological schema,
denominated as the MAnto schema, which is related to the
public transport infrastructure and the accessibility feature
domain. The definition of the MAnto schema is based on the
Transmodel (European Reference Data Model for Public
Transport Information) [76] and IFOPT (Identification of
Fixed Objects in Public Transport) [45] reference data
models. Transmodel describes a model of both public
transport concepts and data structures related to the different
kinds of public transport. IFOPT extends it by including
specific structures designed to specify accessibility data
concerning the equipment of vehicles, stops and access areas
in order to define a model for the principal so-called fixed
objects, i.e. elements related to the access to public transport
(e.g., entrances, stop places, connection links). We have,
therefore, obtained a set of metadata (MAntoterminology)
with which to semantically annotate the public transport
infrastructure and its accessibility elements data from sources
[21].
As mentioned in the previous subsection, data from the
different sources are organised and related according to an
underlying conceptual model, which we have defined as the
domain model. Our data are, therefore, always domain
objects and are related in the same way, that is, by following
the relationships described in that model. The ontological
schema, denominated as the MAnto schema, is also based on
the same domain model. It represents data in that context, i.e.
in that domain. The MAnto vocabulary (a set of terms)
consequently also represents the domain objects, and the
relationships between terms are additionally contemplated in
that reference model, again our domain model. Fig.4 shows
how the MAnto ontology schema is defined following the
structure of the domain model in the transport context.
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FIGURE 4. The definition of MAnto Ontology Schema
Fig. 4 shows only a fragment of the domain model in (A)
and a fragment of the MAnto ontology schema in (B). We
depict how an object in the domain model, denominated as
oD-n, is defined as a class in the MAnto ontology schema.
For example, the Public Transport object in (A) is defined as
the http://com.vortic3.MANTO#PublicTransport class in (B).
Similarly, a relationship between two objects in the domain
model, denominated as rD-x, is defined as a data property in
the MAnto ontology schema. For example, in (A), the
relationship between the Public Transport and the Line object
makes it possible to establish which lines belonging to a
means of Public Transport (Metro Madrid, the London
Underground,
etc.)
are
defined
as
the
http://com.vortic3.MANTO#TransportFor data property in
(B). It also specifies that this property domain is the
http://com.vortic3.MANTO#Line class, and its range is the
http://com.vortic3.MANTO#PublicTransport class.
As defined in [80], all data sources in the public transport
context are specified according to the same underlying
domain model. As our approach uses the same domain model
to identify the objects from data sources and to define the
MAnto ontology schema, it is easy to deduce which terms
from the MAnto ontology are mapped onto the existing
objects in the data sources.
In fact, in the SEM subsystem, we work with the data file
generated from the OAD subsystem. Once again, the data
from that file also represent the same objects from the domain
model. Moreover, we can use the MAnto ontology to define
a set of consistent mappings with which to semantically
annotate the data from the structured data file generated by
the OAD subsystem. An example of a semantically annotated
data fragment is shown in Fig.5.
mao:line 1_4 a mao:line ;
mao:sequence [ a ;
mao:par_4_295 ;
mao:par_4_294 ;
mao:par_4_293 ;
mao:par_4_27 ;
.......
] ;
mao:transportFor "Metro" ;
sch:description "Pinar de Chamartín-Valdecaros" ;
sch:name "Line 1" .
FIGURE 5. Data annotated by means of MAnto Ontology
In this figure, it will be noted that the subway has a line
(sch:name “Line 1”) that is internally coded as line 1_4, and
which is composed of a set of stations (par_4_295, par_4_294,
par_4_29 ) ordered as a sequence.
At the end of the process, these data will be stored in the
semantic Jena repository, in the public transport &
accessibility collection, as shown in Fig.3. Data from this
collection can be downloaded at any moment from
http://coruscant.my.to:8080/download/metro.xml.
The available data is now growing steadily, as this
information is increasingly more valuable to users. In this
respect, it might be necessary to change the ontologies in
order to adapt to this growth if the domain model evolves. In
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fact, MAnto is a ‘living ontology’, that is, it can be expanded
through the use of an iterative and incremental process [39],
thus making it possible to semantically annotate new data that
could appear over time.
The SEM subsystem similarly includes other ontological
schema related to incidents (i.e. changes in the working state)
of the accessibility elements in the public transport network,
which could occur at any time (more information is provided
in [16]). Incident data, which are obtained from the Smart
Data subsystem, have to be semantically annotated and then
stored in the Jena repository, in the incidents collection, as
shown in Fig. 3. In this case, we have defined a set of mapping
rules with which to automatically transform data from the
SMD subsystem into RDF graphs by means of RML. Sample
data from the incidents collection can be downloaded from
http://coruscant.my.to:8080/download/events.xml.
D. SMART DATA SUBSYSTEM
The Smart Data (SMD) subsystem employs crowdsourcing
techniques [21] to proce...
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