Triangulum City Dashboard: An Interactive Data Analytic Platform for Visualizing Smart City Performance

Abstract

Cities are becoming smarter by incorporating hardware technology, software systems, and network infrastructure that provide Information Technology (IT) systems with real-time awareness of the real world. What makes a “smart city” functional is the combined use of advanced infrastructure technologies to deliver its core services to the public in a remarkably efficient manner. City dashboards have drawn increasing interest from both city operators and citizens. Dashboards can gather, visualize, analyze, and inform regional performance to support the sustainable development of smart cities. They provide useful tools for evaluating and facilitating urban infrastructure components and services. This work proposes an interactive web-based data visualization and data analytics toolkit supported by big data aggregation tools. The system proposed is a cloud-based prototype that supports visualization and real-time monitoring of city trends while processing and displaying large data sets on a standard web browser. However, it is capable of supporting online analysis processing by answering analytical queries and producing graphics from multiple resources. The aim of this platform is to improve communication between users and urban service providers and to give citizens an overall view of the city’s state. The conceptual framework and architecture of the proposed platform are explored, highlighting design challenges and providing insight into the development of smart cities. Moreover, results and the potential statistical analysis of important city services offered by the system are introduced. Finally, we present some challenges and opportunities identified through the development of the city data platform.

Advanced Technologies and Their Use in Smart City Management

“…The application layer manages data in the central layer of the architecture, analyzes indicators and connects the data and presentation layer. The presentation layer is used to communicate with residents and displays information about services [28].…”

An Interactive Dashboard Using a Virtual Assistant for Visualizing Smart Manufacturing

“…Dashboards in this paper are the main interface between the backend systems and users. ey, first appearing in the early 1990s and having been of interest to researchers, provide a means of summarizing important information and visualizing with graphical components such as charts, graphs, diagrams, and maps [9]. From the perspective of design philosophy, there is a visual genre of dashboards and a functional genre.…”

“…As modern cities are increasing in multiple dimensions (e.g., population, geographical size, and economic activities), it is important to provide real-time awareness applications with the incorporation of sensor data and network infrastructure. Urban dashboards are used to visualize the information of the city's current state and offer communication between city operators and citizens [6,9]. e health-related issue is a major concern nowadays.…”

Do city dashboards make sense? Conceptualising user experiences and challenges in using city dashboards. A case study

“…For the purpose of this study, we define city dashboards to be online platforms that give access to data and information about a city to users. Research into city dashboards as a "means" to provide access to open data, has predominantly focused on how dashboards are developed (context of smart cities, open data [5,17,41]; context of technology, visualisation [25,50,55]). There have been attempts to evaluate city dashboards in terms of design and visualisation [51,64] and in relation to effectiveness and efficiency [15].…”