Project Goals and Concepts
The project will be able to contribute to an improved take-up of innovative tools by relevant urban stakeholders, reduce costs with the automated monitoring and analysis features, increase the usage of big data for urban governance and integrate manifold expert knowledge into a multi-dimensional decision support solution. Taking these innovative approaches, the project is structured and focused on five detailed objectives:
(1) Elaborate the foundation of an innovative and modern approach toward urban governance by conducting research on relevant visualisation and analytical methods for open and social data, urban decision making approaches and expert advisory systems.
(2) Perform comprehensive stakeholder studies by identifying and structuring relevant actors, workflows, information sources, decision routines, best practices and requirements.
(3) Model methods and develop intuitive designs for the UrbanDataVisualiser including precise specifications, interfaces to relevant data sources and a multi-layered presentation dash-board.
(4) Develop and exemplify new techniques and visualisations for the UrbanDecisionMaker in-cluding expert integration specifications, multi-round survey schemes and democratic advi-sory approaches.
(5) Advance and implement a demonstrator with a flexible and scalable system architecture and interactive modules to run a proof of concept and final validation tests by end users.
The conceptual framework of UrbanData2Decide is based on two main elements that the project will develop to support urban governance. Building on the broad data pools in the form of social media content and open data sets, the UrbanDataVisualiser will aggregate, structure and visualise this data using a multi-layered and multi-dimensional approach. The framework will extensively use data mining, sentiment analysis and visualization techniques and lead to the development of a proof-of-concept demonstrator to present the output using intuitive and clear dashboards. The UrbanDecisionMaker will complement this bottom-up approach by integrating external experts and advisors using scientific multi-round expert integration methods and tools such as the Delphi method, a structured communication technique, developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts.
Role of MCE
Major Cities of Europe’s tasks in the project will mainly be related to dissemination activities and advisory, such as:
– Disseminate project results, e.g. spreading regular newsletters, and stakeholder questionnaire(s) via the Major Cities of Europe network;
– Support with the organisation of one UrbanData2Decide Workshop at the Major Cities of Europe Conference;
– Participate at some project meetings;
– Advice and provide feedback on the project results based on own experiences, e.g. during project meetings.