U-TOOL: Urban Intelligence. Tool for improving municipal services based on social media activity

U-tool is a tool that allows a quick analysis of a city’s activity through the participation of its inhabitants in social networks and facilitates decision-making for the improvement of various municipal services. Its usefulness includes both the professional field – for example, it allows the analysis of urban planning – and the private one, facilitating the mobility of citizens and tourists who wish to explore the activity of a certain specific area in real time. Unlike other tools that display heat maps, U-tool generates an outline map that indicates where people are moving taking into account the attractiveness potential of the city. To do this, the social network Twitter is used, whose data is public. The tool extracts geo-positioned data from Twitter and uses it as an input source to calculate the gravitational potential at a set of points in the city. Using the values obtained, a matrix is generated that is used to draw the contour map. U-tool translates this data into an activity contour map and allows the gravitational potential to be obtained, a measurement that indicates and visually shows the city’s points of attraction. In the public sphere,

U-TOOL can be used to analyse concentrations of people and, in this way, improve municipal services such as transport or traffic light control in real time. Temporal analysis over time allows similar mobility patterns to be analysed and helps when making mobility decisions in periods where activity is expected to be similar. This application has been developed using Django, the most popular Python web environment. Raw data begins to be collected by the app when a user creates a new “collection task” for a hashtag, a geographic area, or both. UTool will query a social network and the next stream of tweets will be filtered and saved in a distributed system based on HDFS and Parquet designed for massive storage scalability. The data is then ready to be processed with any of the analytical tools available, and this is done using efficient and parallel big data computing libraries such as Dask. Finally, an easy-to-use web frontend presents the calculation results to the user visually.

U-tool has been applied to the city of Valencia, although the tool is valid for any other city. The data has been integrated into the Valencia City Council’s Fireware platform and, in the future, will be included in its transparency and open data portal.