Papers by Devanjan Bhattacharya
Tell Me How My Open Data Is Re-used: Increasing Transparency Through the Open City Toolkit
Open Cities | Open Data, 2019
The Open Data movement has been gaining momentum in recent years, with increasingly many public i... more The Open Data movement has been gaining momentum in recent years, with increasingly many public institutions making their data freely accessible. Despite much data being already open (and more to come), finding information about the actual usage of these open datasets is still a challenge. This chapter introduces two tools of the Open City Toolkit (OCT) that tackle this issue: a tool to increase transparency and interactive guidelines. Interviews with city council employees confirmed the utility of the transparency tool. Both tools can be used by city councils (for planning purposes) and by users interested to know more about the value of current open datasets (for information purposes).
Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science
Active micro-mobility decreases traffic, bolsters personal health, and helps communities thrive b... more Active micro-mobility decreases traffic, bolsters personal health, and helps communities thrive by protecting the environment. Moreover, sustainable micro-mobility demand is expected to get boosted in the present and post-COVID society. In this work we highlight the micro-mobility modes of walkability and bicycling to city administrators controlling urban city-space, by adapting the mobility parameters and their use cases through a map-based interface. Software tools and web-based applications are introduced for easy policy decisions by city managers. Present study scope is circumscribed by exploration of different parameters in traditional and state of art data science models, for resource planning like cycle usage prediction and planning. These parameters show hazard safedistance pedestrian flow, optimal resource planning, amenity reach (10 min cycling and walking distance) and mobility using walking and cycling modes. Parameters of the traditional Social Force Model for Pedestrian Dynamics are also inspected, according to COVID social norms, to capture safe pedestrian flow density. Finally, the analysis of two case studies, of Bhubaneshwar city and New Delhi, in India, are discussed for policy suggestions to enhance mobility via sustainable micro-mobility modes. The developed system assists managers in decisions based on urban data intelligence, and at user end eases commute related mental tension, anxiety and dependencies. The developed application is running live on our server maintained at Edinburgh University.
Adaptive traffic signal control for developing countries using fused parameters derived from crowd-source data
Transportation Letters, 2022
The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Union through the GEO-C project (H20... more The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Union through the GEO-C project (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014, Grant Agreement Number 642332, http://www.geoc. eu/). Carlos Granell has been funded by the Ramon y Cajal Programme (grant number RYC- 2014-16913). Sergio Trilles has been funded by the postdoctoral programme Vali+d (GVA) (grant number APOSTD/2016/058).
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016
The literature has offered a number of surveys regarding the concept of smart city, but few asses... more The literature has offered a number of surveys regarding the concept of smart city, but few assessments of toolkits. This paper presents a short analysis of existing smart city toolkits. The analysis yields some general observations about existing toolkits. The article closes with a brief introduction of the Open City Toolkit, a toolkit currently under development which aims at addressing some of the gaps of existing toolkits.
A review of downscaling procedures - a contribution to the research on climate change impacts at city scale
EGUGA, Apr 1, 2016
ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2016
The holy grail of smart cities is an integrated, sustainable approach to improve the efficiency o... more The holy grail of smart cities is an integrated, sustainable approach to improve the efficiency of the city's operations and the quality of life of citizens. At the heart of this vision is the citizen, who is the primary beneficiary of smart city initiatives, either directly or indirectly. Despite the recent surge of research and smart cities initiatives in practice, there are still a number of challenges to overcome in realizing this vision. This position paper points out six citizen-related challenges: the engagement of citizens, the improvement of citizens' data literacy, the pairing of quantitative and qualitative data, the need for open standards, the development of personal services, and the development of persuasive interfaces. The article furthermore advocates the use of methods and techniques from GIScience to tackle these challenges, and presents the concept of an Open City Toolkit as a way of transferring insights and solutions from GIScience to smart cities.
Categories Of Datasets Offered By Current Open Data Portals
This dataset lists categories of open datasets from 40 European open data catalogs. The 40 Europe... more This dataset lists categories of open datasets from 40 European open data catalogs. The 40 European data catalogues were taken from four countries (France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom) at a rate of 10 per country. These categories are an indicator of the topics of interests in the respective countries (back in 2016), the types of questions data publishers assume users will ask, and ultimately the types of questions citizens can ask.
Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Software Technologies
Geoinformation technologies require fast processing of high and quickly increasing volumes of all... more Geoinformation technologies require fast processing of high and quickly increasing volumes of all types of spatial data. Parallel computational approach and distributed systems represent technologies which are able to provide required services, with reasonable costs. MapReduce is one example of such approach. It has been successfully implemented in large clusters in several instances. The applications include spatial and imagery data processing. The contribution deals with its implementation and operational performance using only a very small cluster (consisting of a few commodity personal computers) to process large-volume spatial data. Open-source implementation of MapReduce, named, Apache Hadoop, is used. The contribution is focused on a low-price solution and it deals with speed of processing and distribution of processed files. Authors run several experiments to evaluate the benefit of distributed data processing in a small-sized cluster and to find possible limitations. Size of processed files and number of processed values is used as the most important criteria for performance evaluation. Point elevation data were used during the experiments.
ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
The GEO-C doctoral programme, entitled "Geoinformatics: Enabling Open Cities", is funded by the E... more The GEO-C doctoral programme, entitled "Geoinformatics: Enabling Open Cities", is funded by the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (International Training Networks (ITN), European Joint Doctorates) until December 2018, and is managed by three European universities in Germany, Portugal and Spain. 15 doctoral grantholders (Early Stage Researchers) were selected to work on specific three-year projects, all contributing to improving the notion of open cities, and specifically to an Open City Toolkit of methodologies, code, and best practice examples. Contributions include volunteered geographic information (VGI), public information displays, mobility apps to encourage green living, providing open data to immigrant populations, reducing the second-order digital divide, sensing of quality of life, proximity based privacy protection, and spatio-temporal online social media analysis. All doctoral students conducted long-term visits and were embedded in city governments and businesses, to gain experience from multiple perspectives in addition to the researcher and users' perspective. The projects are situated within three areas: transparency, participation, and collaboration. They took mostly a bottom-up (citizen-centric) approach to (smart) open cities, rather than relying on large IT companies to create smart open cities in a top-down manner. This paper discusses the various contributions to enabling open cities, explains in some detail the Open City Toolkit, and its possible uses and impact on stakeholders. A follow-up doctoral program has been solicited and, if successful, will continue this line of research and will strengthen aspects of privacy, data provenance, and trust, in an effort to improve relations between data (e.g. news) publishers and consumers.
Goa, India Landslide Hazard Automated Zonation (LHAZ) system
ABSTRACT: The degree of hazard due to landslide in any region is difficult to assess manually. An... more ABSTRACT: The degree of hazard due to landslide in any region is difficult to assess manually. An automated system having capability to correlate causes contributing automated landslide hazard is expected to be an efficient alternative. The objective of this paper is to explain LHAZ (Landslide Hazard Automated Zonation) system, an automated system that has been developed to determine the intensity and extent of landslide hazard in a given region. The system is based on the automated understanding of thematic maps of landslide contributing factors such as soil, lithology, topography, geology etc. The system makes use of the knowledge base available in IS code 14496: 1998. Finally, using an inference scheme, it categorizes the region as different zones of landslide hazard and provides an output map depicting low, medium and high hazard zones. 1.
Bhattacharya, D. & Painho, M. (2018). Design for Geospatially Enabled Climate Modeling and Alert ... more Bhattacharya, D. & Painho, M. (2018). Design for Geospatially Enabled Climate Modeling and Alert System. In Stephan Winter, Amy Griffin & Monika Sester (Eds.), 10th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2018), 22, pp. 22:1–22:6. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Vol. 114. Dagstuhl, Germany: Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. ISBN: 978-3-95977-083-5; ISSN: 1868-8969. DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.GISCIENCE.2018.22. URL: http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/9350/
Enabling Spatial Intelligence Integrating Architectures of SDI and Sensor Web
Spatio-temporal aspects of data lead to critical information. Sensors capture data at all scales ... more Spatio-temporal aspects of data lead to critical information. Sensors capture data at all scales continually so it is imperative that useful information be extracted ubiquitously and regularly. Location plays a vital part by helping understand relations between datasets. It is crucial to link developmental works with spatial attributes and current challenge is to create an open platform that manages real-time sensor data and provides critical spatial analytics atop expert domain knowledge provided in the system. That is a two-faced problem where the solution tackles not only data from multiple sources but also runs data management platform, a spatial data infrastructure(SDI) as backbone framework able to harness sensor web(SW).
The objective is development of an automated natural hazard zonation system with InternetSMS warn... more The objective is development of an automated natural hazard zonation system with InternetSMS warning utilizing geomatics for sustainable societies. At present no web-enabled warning system exists which can disseminate warning after hazard evaluation at one go and in real time. The functionality is to be modular in architecture having GIS-GUI, input, understanding, rainfall prediction, expert, output, and warning modules. Through this paper a significantly enhanced system integrated with Web-enabledgeospatial information has been proposed, and it can be concluded that an automated hazard warning system has been conceptualized and researched. However, now the scope is to develop it further. The research is aimed to create a dynamic and real-time spatial data infrastructure (SDI) solution by the way of continual sharable activity imparted by internet and ArcGIS/ArcIMS). At its core, the system is based on components GeoServer, GeoNetwork, Django, and GeoExt, that provide a platform for...
espanolEn la literatura se distinguen dos enfoques diferentes para la trans-formacion de las actu... more espanolEn la literatura se distinguen dos enfoques diferentes para la trans-formacion de las actuales ciudades en ciudades inteligentes: (a)ofrecer sistemasmas eficientes y autonomos a traves del uso de latecnologia, sensores, etc.; o (b) educar a los ciudadanos para quepuedan hacer frente a los avances tecnologicos en sus ciudades.En este contexto, el proyectoGEO-C (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014) tienecomo objetivo ofrecer estos dos enfoques. Para ello se ofrece unaplataforma de software abierto, llamada Open City Toolkit. Dichaplataforma es considerada como la aglutinacion de herramien-tas para capacitar tanto a ciudadanos y desarrolladores como aadministraciones publicas, en la participacion ciudadana y lograrciudades mas abiertas e inteligentes. Entre estas herramientas seencuentran: aplicaciones, conjuntos de datos, servicios y guias.La Open City Toolkit tiene como mision integrar los avances deinvestigacion provenientes de diferentes tematicas alrededor de las ciudades inteligentes. Dic...
The talk is going to cover research on the development of a globally shared open spatial expert s... more The talk is going to cover research on the development of a globally shared open spatial expert system(ES), LISENS, a first of a kind geo-enabled KBES for multiple fields, smarter cities to climate modelling. LISENS is integration of SW and SDI with domain KB on data and problems, ready to infer solutions. Semantic interoperability of SW, SDI spatio-semantic KBs with inferencing logics of geometry, topology management are critical aspects of work. The session will throw light on several well-known challenges in big data arena such as : i) how to build open source spatial ontologies for spatial phenomenon using causative factors ii) how to connect ontologies to intelligent inferencing logics iii) how to build specialized knowledge bases for a generalized spatial KBES iv) how to apply the system to automate procedures viz. urban and natural v) how to integrate sensor web(SW), other data sources and spatial data infrastructure(SDI) with open source technologies.
Designing an interactive real-time web-mapped dashboard to visualise conflict ceasefires data over COVID-19 infection rates: facilities and the way ahead
2021 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC)
Hazard warning is necessary for effective mitigation due to disaster. People moving into a hazard... more Hazard warning is necessary for effective mitigation due to disaster. People moving into a hazard prone area need to be made aware of the level of threat. In this study, a system to warn against hazard is being proposed. It aims to be independent, fast and pervasive. It is designed to be a generalized system that could be deployed across any region. The system is modular in structure consisting of four functional units and gets activated once it is fed with threat level with geo-location. The existing cellular network is being utilized for disseminating hazard information as short messages. Currently the system is built for warning hazard due to landslides and classification accuracy was previously tested in this domain. Now the message permeability is shown to be virtually instantaneous with a maximum time lag recorded as 50 seconds, minimum of 10 seconds. On an average, the perceived threat message whether high, moderate or low threat, reaches a mobile user within 30 seconds. Such...
Framework for Freight Truck Return-Trip Assignment System
Optimization of freight logistics is crucial for economic development. Technology intrusion in lo... more Optimization of freight logistics is crucial for economic development. Technology intrusion in logistics sector leads it to a new height. However, the major problem persists with freight trucks, either business-to-business (B2B) or owner-driver, is running back empty after they deliver their primary freight to destination. For enhancing earning, freight driver or managing company can leverage the use of an information system for finding out the customer in the return trip as well. Hence, in this paper, we first examine different aspects related to state of art and practice, for return trip truck appointment system. Further, we provided a modular framework for the system. The model of the system is so adapted that freight truck and customer, both behave as a resource to each other, equally likely so that ethics of trip-deal remain protected. The notification is generated according to involve intricacies like internet data connection fluctuation and driver illiteracy.
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Papers by Devanjan Bhattacharya