SMAFramework Urban Data Integration Framework for Mobility Analysis in Smart Cities

Smart cities emerge as a topic to cover how the technology of information and communication can be used in the urban centers to monitor its dynamics and allow the improvement of services for the citizens. In these urban centers, different methodologies are used in order to collect data and provide them to applications. These data come from several heterogeneous sources, thus there is an effort to integrate and standardize them before their use. Also, a significant amount of this data has spatio-temporal annotations, which may be used to analyze the city dynamics, such as the mobility flow. Due to these characteristics of the data generated in urban centers, and also the possibilities brought by their use and analyses, this work presents a novel approach to collect, integrate and perform some analysis tasks in mobility data from smart cities. Thus, the SMAFramework can analyze mobility patterns based on a Multi-Aspect Graph (MAG) data structure. To show the potential of the framework, it is proposed a method to analyze the saptio-temporal correlation between data from two different data sources in the same city. Real data collected from social media and a taxi system of the city of New York are used to evaluate this method. The obtained results allowed to understand some of the applicabilities of the framework and also provided some insights on how to use the framework to resolve specific problems when analyzing mobility in urban environments.