CitySense: A Data Collection Approach for City Computing Applications

Today's cities are filled with sensors to get real-time data on all aspects of the city. Each of these data sources reflects one aspect of the city and provides support for city computing. However, these data are owned by different organizations or companies and stored in different locations of the Internet. It takes lots of efforts for researchers to obtained all of these data. At the same time, a single data set can only represent one side of a city's activities, but combining multiple data allows us to stand in a better perspective overlooking the city we study. We designed a city data aggregation platform to aggregate several data sources about city computing to get a more comprehensive understanding of the city, to discover pattern that are not reflected in a single data set, and facilitate researchers to access data from multiple sources.