Urban legislation assessment by data analytics with smart city characteristics

Abstract

Smart cities receive great attention today especially in conjunction with ubiquitous computing. People feel the need to access information about their cities anywhere anytime. They wish to be actively involved with local government bodies for policy decisions affecting urban lifestyle. Accordingly, this paper describes our research on urban policy management. We analyze urban legislation, more specifically, ordinances or local laws. We categorize ordinances based on smart city characteristics they address. This work deploys data warehousing, XML data management and data mining over categorized ordinances. Interesting findings include relative importance of smart city characteristics considering the focus given by urban agencies. This research helps agencies assess their current ordinance policies with decision support for the future. It also provides urban residents at-a-glance information about their cities and policies with analysis. This work has broader impacts of enhancing smart cities and ubiquitous computing by making useful information widely accessible with suitable inferences.