Urban Data Dynamics: A Systematic Benchmarking Framework to Integrate Crowdsourcing and Smart Cities’ Standardization

Abstract

Urbanization and knowledge economy have highly marked the new millennium. Urbanization brings new challenges which can be addressed by the knowledge economy, which opens up scientific and technical innovation opportunities. The enhancement of cities’ intelligence has heavily impacted city transformation and sustainable decision-making based on urban data knowledge extraction. This work is motivated by the strong demand for robust standardization efforts to steer and measure city performance and dynamics, given the growing tendency of conventional cities’ transformation into smart and resilient ones. This paper revises the earlier so-called “cityDNA” framework, which was designed to detect the interrelations between the six smart city dimensions, such that a city’s profile and capacities are recognized in a systematic manner. The updated framework implements the widely accepted smart city (ISO 37120:2018) standard, along with an adaptive Web service, which processes urban data and visualizes the city’s profile to facilitate decision-making. The proposed framework offers a solid benchmarking service, at which the value of crowdsourced data is exploited for the production of urban knowledge and city transformation empowerment. The proposed benchmarking approach is tested and validated through relevant case studies and a proof-of-concept scenario, in which open data and crowdsourced data are exploited. The outcomes revealed that cities should intensify their KPI-driven data production and exploitation along with a set of solid standards for cities to enable cities with customizable scenarios enriched with indicators that reflect each city’s vibrancy.

Application of Open Government Data to Sustainable City Indicators: A Megacity Case Study

“…Regarding the "ISO 37120", "ISO 37122", or "ISO 37123" indicators, the bibliometric study shows some papers analyze the numerical data available in the open platform [23,52], while others evaluate the historical values of standardized indicators to assess a city's performance and quality of life [24,26,27]. However, those studies do not check the adherence of indicator-calculating formulas to the ISO standards.…”

“…On the other hand, as discussed in Section 2.1.2, some authors present studies from quantitative indicator surveys, not necessarily of the entire ISO 3712x series, of Polish [26], Italian [27], European [50], and Artic [24] cities. Those authors elaborated on important critical analyses, such as in [23], on the insufficiency of data to cover the full range of activities in most cities. Another point raised by [23] is that the open data platforms in most cities contain archival data from other public or private organizations, updated monthly or annually.…”

“…Those authors elaborated on important critical analyses, such as in [23], on the insufficiency of data to cover the full range of activities in most cities. Another point raised by [23] is that the open data platforms in most cities contain archival data from other public or private organizations, updated monthly or annually. It is worth mentioning that although most of the dataset used in this work (from the ObservaSampa) is updated annually, not all indicators are updated, which can make it difficult to monitor public policies continuously, in addition to hampering statistical analyses with longer historical series.…”

“…The authors in [48] analyzed city indicators real-time dashboards (including Operations Centre in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and the authors in [2] reviewed 66 relevant research studies on the impact of open data initiatives to smart cities. Similarly, [23,25,49] performed a comprehensive analysis of various city indicators, with part of the ISO 3712x series applied to cities in the World Council on City Data (WCCD) database (https://www.da taforcities.org/, accessed on 3 July 2022. Unfortunately, data on ISO 37120 indicators for several cities that used to be in the platform are no longer available.…”

“…These authors undertook important critical analysis [23], using cases of cities such as London, Boston, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Barcelona. The ISO 37120 indicators in the WCCD were also analyzed by [50], for Amsterdam, Gdynia, London, and Zagreb.…”