Digital technologies offer new possibilities for improving the quality of life of people living in Smart Cities. City administrations are more and more soliciting citizens to provide indications about problems they notice in the city and citizens are keen to contribute to improve the quality of life. Citizens may be considered as complex sensors in Smart Cities, they provide rich data, such as individual measurements, their subjective perceptions or personal comments [1–3]. This paper is about the work we are carrying out with a Smart City municipality on the use of interactive visualizations to support the analysis of multidimensional data reported by citizens through specific apps on mobile devices. The analysis aims at reducing the time to solve the reported problems as well as understanding the different performances of the municipality departments involved in the process. Many effective visualization techniques are available in the literature [5–7]. Choosing a good visualization technique depends very much on the type of data and on the needs and objectives of the analysts. In order to better satisfy the analysts’ requirements, in creating the visualizations we adopted an approach inspired to the Cooperative Method Development (CMD) proposed by Dittrich et al. [4], which emphasizes a strong collaboration between IT researchers and experts in the work practice, in order to focus on the practitioners’ problems, identify issues and propose improvements. The work with the city data analysts led to the development of various visualizations, some are based on already known techniques, e.g. the Treemap [8], others have been purposely created to show in a single visualization the multidimensional data of interest. The analysts appreciated a lot the proposed visualizations, which allow them to easily detect trends, anomalies and significant facts in the management of urban issues; they acknowledged very much that these visualizations greatly improve their data analysis activities
Visualizations of multidimensional data reported by citizens - Presentazione al congresso
Paolo Buono;Maria Costabile;Alessandra Legretto;
2020-01-01
Abstract
Digital technologies offer new possibilities for improving the quality of life of people living in Smart Cities. City administrations are more and more soliciting citizens to provide indications about problems they notice in the city and citizens are keen to contribute to improve the quality of life. Citizens may be considered as complex sensors in Smart Cities, they provide rich data, such as individual measurements, their subjective perceptions or personal comments [1–3]. This paper is about the work we are carrying out with a Smart City municipality on the use of interactive visualizations to support the analysis of multidimensional data reported by citizens through specific apps on mobile devices. The analysis aims at reducing the time to solve the reported problems as well as understanding the different performances of the municipality departments involved in the process. Many effective visualization techniques are available in the literature [5–7]. Choosing a good visualization technique depends very much on the type of data and on the needs and objectives of the analysts. In order to better satisfy the analysts’ requirements, in creating the visualizations we adopted an approach inspired to the Cooperative Method Development (CMD) proposed by Dittrich et al. [4], which emphasizes a strong collaboration between IT researchers and experts in the work practice, in order to focus on the practitioners’ problems, identify issues and propose improvements. The work with the city data analysts led to the development of various visualizations, some are based on already known techniques, e.g. the Treemap [8], others have been purposely created to show in a single visualization the multidimensional data of interest. The analysts appreciated a lot the proposed visualizations, which allow them to easily detect trends, anomalies and significant facts in the management of urban issues; they acknowledged very much that these visualizations greatly improve their data analysis activitiesI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
