Integrating CyberGIS and Urban Sensing for Reproducible Streaming Analytics

Abstract

Increasingly pervasive location-aware sensors interconnected with rapidly advancing wireless network services are motivating the development of near-real-time urban analytics. This development has revealed both tremendous challenges and opportunities for scientific innovation and discovery. However, state-of-the-art urban discovery and innovation are not well equipped to resolve the challenges of such analytics, which in turn limits new research questions from being asked and answered. Specifically, commonly used urban analytics capabilities are typically designed to handle, process, and analyze static datasets that can be treated as map layers and are consequently ill-equipped in (a) resolving the volume and velocity of urban big data; (b) meeting the computing requirements for processing, analyzing, and visualizing these datasets; and (c) providing concurrent online access to such analytics. To tackle these challenges, we have developed a novel cyberGIS framework that includes computationally reproducible approaches to streaming urban analytics. This framework is based on CyberGIS-Jupyter, through integration of cyberGIS and real-time urban sensing, for achieving capabilities that have previously been unavailable toward helping cities solve challenging urban informatics problems.