A Citizen-Centric Approach for the Improvement of Territorial Services Management

Abstract

In the last decade, there has been a growing awareness that the involvement of citizens in decision making can produce an immediate and positive impact on actions to be taken, as they are the real owners of knowledge about the place where they live. By collecting and geolocating data through smartphones and the Internet, citizens in fact can help decision makers both create sharable spatio-temporal information about objects and phenomena and interpret territorial dynamics. However, although such a role has been definitely recognized, the lack of a homogeneous paradigm for structuring the sensing process, managing the geo big data produced and handling services makes it difficult to exploit such a potentiality. In this paper, we describe a citizen-centric approach conceived to build territorial knowledge useful to provide decision makers with a timely and reliable picture of the status of a given territory. In particular, a visual representation of geospatial knowledge is described, which summaries context-sensitive information about a territory and its citizens, thus improving the land monitoring tasks. An information system, SAFE, is finally presented, which consists of a Web and a mobile component to manage citizen supplied data to be integrated for building reliable dynamic scenarios.

Water Energy Food Nexus in Urbanizing Wetlands: Challenges and Solutions Explored through Choremes and Focus Maps

“…The next level of abstraction displaying the complex interdependencies between natural and human systems of WEF Nexus are seen in CFMs ( [20,55,56]). Discussing CFMs, collaboration and constructive criticism about essential features for advancing CFMs as a decision-support tool are seem to become important in next perspective.…”

Water Energy Food Nexus in Urbanizing Wetlands: Challenges and Solutions Explored through Choremes and Focus Maps

“…The next level of abstraction displaying the complex interdependencies between natural and human systems of the WEF nexus can be seen in CFMs [31,67,68]. Discussing CFMs, collaboration and constructive criticism about essential features for advancing CFMs as a decision-support tool are seen to become important in the next perspective.…”

Construction of a Composite Vulnerability Index to Map Peripheralization Risk in Urban and Metropolitan Areas

“…It should be noted that the analysis is conducted with reference to quantitative data, therefore it does not take into account, for example, the qualitative data represented by subjective perception of overall risk by the population [55]. So it is desirable to encourage participation of the population in the decision-making process, to verify and discuss the correspondence of technical contents of the obtained maps with the subjective risk perception, as well as to collect observations and proposals from people who live in urban areas subject to intervention [56][57][58]. Once the priority areas have been individuated, the various vulnerability maps in the different considered domains can guide the decision-making process by pointing out the factors on which to focus to reduce the potential degradation, both for more effective risk mitigation and for greater optimization of the resources necessary to carry out the planned interventions.…”