CONCEPT AND EVALUATION OF AN URBAN PLATFORM FOR INTERACTIVE VISUAL ANALYTICS

Abstract. Urban platforms are becoming a vital role player in city resources management for achieving the right balance between social and economic services and their impact on the environment. More and more cities are starting to benefit from an urban platform to state the city conditions and re-coin the shape of life depending on data gathered from different city systems. However, urban platforms need further support of data analytics in respect of reaching a smart city platform helping city planners with better decision making. Besides, the majority of operational urban platforms consider 2D data only, missing out on the possible information that could be obtained from 3D city models. This work proposes a concept for an urban platform that supports data manipulation and visualization plus interactive analytic functionalities. As a prototype, an urban platform is implemented for integrating and processing 3D city models and 2D traffic data to derive air pollutants emission rates with analytic visualization, leading urban planning to concentrate on the most affected areas. In addition, interactive features are implemented, including filtering, querying, and classifying data to support the analytic visualization in the developed urban platform.