Quality of Urban Life IG rev-002

Please note that this document has changed substantially from the version that the comments below refer to. In particular, this has now changed from a Working Group Case Statement to an Interest Group Charter.

RDA Interest Group Draft Charter Template

Name of Proposed Interest Group: Quality of Urban Life (QoUL) Interest Group

Brief statement of objectives (what, in general, is this IG hoping to accomplish):

The aim of the IG is to identify methodological and data-related opportunities and barriers to the use of interoperable open access datasets in the economic, social, and environmental domains that can be used to build comparable Urban Quality of Life (QoUL) indicators in a global setting.

User scenario(s) or use case(s) the IG wishes to address (what triggered the desire for this IG in the first place):

In theory open data infrastructures and open government initiatives should be able to provide data that can be used to derive indicators that are repeatable and support inter and intra city comparative analysis. However, is this the case?

Objectives (primary focus areas):

This Interest Group will draw upon existing initiatives in US, Europe, Canada and Australia to address the above question and identify and assess data methodological and data-related strengths and barriers to the development of QoUL indicators. A select number of cities will be used to compute one or more comparable QoUL indicators and examine key aspects such as scale, data quality, temporality, provenance, etc…. Given the extent to which social media and web resources may increasingly become useful data sources for the development of dynamic QoUL indicators, the IG will also begin to consider methods to develop a dedicated QoUL data dictionary useful for data mining.

Participation (who can/should participate; if any special skill sets or knowledge base is desired, list that here):

This IG is led by three large scale initiatives:  the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE), and Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) in the UK. There is also opportunity for other such large-scale research initiatives to be actively involved in this working group.

In the context of Australia, AURIN is supporting the formulation and distribution of national benchmarked small area indicators products including:

• OECD comparable and other selected small areas indicators
• Small area wellbeing and quality of life
• Small area indicators of disadvantage for the indigenous population
• Australian national datasets for social and health indicators
• An analytical platform for the integration of VicHealth Survey and Spatial Objective Contextual Data.

In the context of the EU, INSPIRE is the legal framework establishing an infrastructure across the 28 member states to share environmental and spatial information and services. Building on this platform (http://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/), new institutional projects at the European Commission Joint Research Centre complement official data from public administrations with dynamic data from sensor networks and the public to develop new indicators of wellbeing and quality of life in urban areas.

In the UK, the UBDC at the University of Glasgow (http://urbanbigdatacentre.ac.uk/) is a unique ESRC-funded research centre to address social, economic and environmental challenges facing cities. UBDC brings interdisciplinary expertise of urban social scientists and data scientists from University of Glasgow and five partner universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge, Reading, Bristol and Illinois-Chicago to seek solutions in addressing such challenges.

The University of Toronto has also agreed to participate with a focus on Toronto’s Open data and work on an urban data ontology.

Other groups to be engaged in the project include:

• RDA Geospatial IG
• Global Cities Institute
• OECD group on indicators of well-being, and WEBCOSI project (www.webcosi.eu)
• European Statistical System Task Force on Big Data and Official Statistics (TBC)
• OGC – Urban Planning Working Group (TBC)

Outcomes (success criteria, specific deliverables, or goals expected to be achieved through this IG):

• The group will assess data methodological and data-related opportunities and barriers to the creation of dynamic QoUL indicators using a range of available open data sources. Selected QoUL indicators will be tested across two or more continents.
• The project will produce a report of the findings in putting together the datasets and indicators across the selected cities, and identify other potential sources of data that need opening up.
• The indicators will be hosted in a suitable open data platform. However, these indicator products are being recreated to expose the strengths and weaknesses of the underlying data and will not serve as an indicator toolkit for decision-makers to use.
• The IG will assess the feasibility of developing a dedicated urban data dictionary, leveraging existing thesauri and dictionaries such as the INSPIRE feature concept dictionary, the General Environmental Multilingual Thesaurus, EuroVOC, etc. and augmented by folksonomies derived from social networks data mining.

Mechanism (how and how often the group will meet and how it will do its work):

• The IG will meet bi-monthly or quarterly via Google Hangouts or Skype and email will be used to share information in the group on a regular basis.
• The RDA website will be used to manage the IG’s web presence and shared documents

Timeline (draft milestones and goals for the first 12 months):

• Review sets of existing indicators and ISO 37120:2014 – Sustainable development of communities – Indicators for city services and quality of life. (Month 1)
• Select case studies cities  (Month 2)
• Identify a minimum set of QoUL indicators that can be developed and tested based on open government and open access datasets. (Month 3)
• Create similar existing indicators comprising subjective and objective data from the selected case study cities. (Month 3-6)
• Analyse the differences and similarities in underlying data collection and indicator formation methodologies and develop a research needs statement regarding data/sensor fusion and data linkage methods that will be necessary to undertake comparative work. This will include common metadata standards, ontologies etc… (Months 6-9).
• Assess the feasibility and methodological challenges in developing a dedicated urban dictionary to support data mining from on-line databases. (Months 9-12).
• Identify the barriers to open access to the data necessary to build the selected indicators, and provide recommendations to RDA on possible action to remove such barriers (Months 12-15)

Potential Group Members (include proposed chairs and all members who have expressed interest):

TAB Review: https://rd-alliance.org/groups/rda-technical-advisory-board-tab/wiki/urb…

Urban_QoL_IG_v1_submitted.pdf