The Socialoid: A Computational Model of a City

Abstract

A socialoid (our term) is an integrated collection of data and models about a society. As such, and accepting that it can never be complete, it is a computational model of a society. We are in the early stages of building a socialoid for Philadelphia, PA. We call it the Philadelphioid. The Philadelphioid is a diachronic (temporal), mashed, geographic information system (GIS) with an extensive integrated library of integrated analytics tools. The purpose of this chapter is to articulate our design rationale for the Philadelphioid and to illustrate its underlying concepts and premises. Central among these concepts is the principle of solution pluralism, which enjoins us to use analytics and visualization to create and explore multiple solutions to decision problems. We illustrate an application of this philosophy by discussing analysis pertaining to food deserts carried out with the Philadelphioid.