Development of a Common Framework for Analysing Public Transport Smart Card Data

The data generated in public transport systems have proven to be of great importance in improving knowledge of public transport systems, being very valuable in promoting the sustainability of public transport through rational management. However, the analysis of this data involves numerous tasks, so that when the value of analysing the data is finally verified, the effort has already been very great. The management and analysis of the collected data face some difficulties. This is the case of the data collected by the current automated fare collection systems. These systems do not follow any open standards and are not usually designed with a multipurpose nature, so they do not facilitate the data analysis workflow (i.e., acquisition, storage, quality control, integration and quantitative analysis). Intending to reduce this workload, we propose a conceptual framework for analysing data from automated fare collection systems in mobility studies. The main components of this framework are (1) a simple data model, (2) scripts for creating and querying the database and (3) a system for reusing the most useful queries. This framework has been tested in a real public transport consortium in a Spanish region shaped by tourism. The outcomes of this research work could be reused and applied, with a lower initial effort, in other areas that have data recorded by an automated fare collection system but are not sure if it is worth investing in exploiting the data. After this experience, we consider that, even with the legal limitations applicable to the analysis of this type of data, the use of open standards by automated fare collection systems would facilitate the use of this type of data to its full potential. Meanwhile, the use of a common framework may be enough to start analysing the data

Data science in public mental health : a new analytic framework

Understanding public mental health issues and finding solutions can be complex and requires advanced techniques, compared to conventional data analysis projects. It is important to have a comprehensive project management process to ensure that project associates are competent and have enough knowledge to implement the process. Therefore, this paper presents a new framework that mental health professionals can use to solve challenges they face. Although a large number of research papers have been published on public mental health, few have addressed the use of data science in public mental health. Recently, Data Science has changed the way we manage, analyze and leverage data in healthcare industry. Data science projects differ from conventional data analysis, primarily because of the scientific approach used during data science projects. One of the motives for introducing a new framework is to motivate healthcare professionals to use "Data Science" to address the challenges of mental health. Having a good data analysis framework and clear guidelines for a comprehensive analysis is always a plus point. It also helps to predict the time and resources needed in the early in the process to get a clear idea of the problem to be solved

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

Large spatial datasets: Present Challenges, future opportunities

The key advantages of a well-designed multidimensional database is its ability to allow as many users as possible across an organisation to simultaneously gain access and view of the same data. Large spatial datasets evolve from scientific activities (from recent days) that tends to generate large databases which always come in a scale nearing terabyte of data size and in most cases are multidimensional. In this paper, we look at the issues pertaining to large spatial datasets; its feature (for example views), architecture, access methods and most importantly design technologies. We also looked at some ways of possibly improving the performance of some of the existing algorithms for managing large spatial datasets. The study reveals that the major challenges militating against effective management of large spatial datasets is storage utilization and computational complexity (both of which are characterised by the size of spatial big data which now tends to exceeds the capacity of commonly used spatial computing systems owing to their volume, variety and velocity). These problems fortunately can be combated by employing functional programming method or parallelization techniques

The Perils of Using Social Media Data to Predict the Spread of Diseases

The data produced by social media engagement is of interest to various organizations and has been used in different applications like marketing, finance and healthcare. Though the potential of mining this data is high, standard data mining processes do not address the peculiarities of social media data. In this paper, we explore the perils of using social media data in predicting the spread of an infectious disease; perils that are mostly related to data quality, textual analysis and location information. We synthesize findings from a literature review and a data mining exercise to develop an adapted data mining process. This process has been designed to minimize the effects of the perils identified and is thus more aligned with the requirements of predicting disease spread using social media data. The process should be useful to data miners and health institution