URBAN SENSING

Urban Sensing through User Generated Contents

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The project aims at bringing a new product to the urban design, city planning and urban management market: a platform extracting patterns of use and citizens' perceptions related or concerning city spaces, through robust analysis of User Generated Content (UGC) shared by the city users and inhabitants over social networks and digital media. Traditional data collection methods - such as surveys, interviews and ethnographic observations –have some limitations: high cost in terms of time and resources and limited size of the samples they can generally cover. More recently, methods based on real-time data and web harvesting have been adopted, but a focus on their spatial and temporal dimension is still lacking. Now it is time to experiment with new methods, which are made possible by the fact that an increasingly high number of citizens can produce and share geolocalized information about their everyday life experience on searchable social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare etc. Applying text mining and conversation analysis to geolocalized UGC Urban Sensing will provide meaningful indexes and dynamic maps depicting citizens' shared perceptions, emotions, hints and opinions regarding public services, urban spaces, time-based events, and the city as a whole. A set of visualisation tools, targeting the needs of the involved SMEs, provide interaction with this maps and indexes. Based on the specific needs of the SMEs, a wide range of indicators will be defined and validated through iterative tests to be performed in 3 different countries. It will provide an insight into understanding how public policies, spatial interventions, events and transformations are perceived within a city, and at the same time it will give hints to designers, developers and entrepreneurs adopting a more human-centred approach toward our cities’ evolution. Urban Sensing, during 27 months of activities, can also be the basis for building innovative services based on distinct local spatial and temporal intelligence.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

An EU project is developing an innovative system for monitoring social media for comments relating to public places and services. Using the information, civil authorities can gauge opinion and respond with improved planning and management.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

City planners, managers and other authorities need to know how citizens use and respond to public spaces. Yet, conventional information-gathering methods, such as surveys or observations, can be time consuming and costly, while still ultimately limited.

The EU-funded project 'Urban sensing through user generated contents' (http://urban-sensing.eu (URBAN SENSING)) proposed an alternative. Many people offer their opinions on searchable social media, including Twitter and Facebook. The six-member project aimed to create text-mining software for collecting the user-created content, specifically to extract and analyse responses to public spaces and services. The system provides an ability to map and time-track responses that other analysis methods currently lack. The comprehensive information, broken down according to place and user profile, will help civil authorities respond to public feedback via improved designs and planning. The two-year project concludes in September 2014.

The consortium's complex software work involved two parts. One was collection of data from social media sources, in addition to annotation and indexing. The second part meant querying and analysing the obtained data, including filtering and aggregation.

During the first reporting period, the team defined the indicators necessary to filter crowd data, and identified the usage scenarios and requirements. The work also included identification of main data pools, implementation of data collectors for three social media platforms, and installation of CartoDB. The consortium created a draft version of the graphical user interface.

The URBAN SENSING project will result in a system capable of trawling social media for comments, and of analysing responses to certain places or events. Apart from the planned role in improving public services, the system also offers commercial opportunity for European small and medium-sized businesses.