Creation of a Multimodal Urban Transportation Network through Spatial Data Integration from Authoritative and Crowdsourced Data

One of the most significant challenges in cities concerns urban mobility. Urban mobility involves the use of different modes of transport, which can be individual or collective, and different organizations can produce their respective datasets that, usually, are used isolated from each other. The lack of an integrated view of the entire multimodal urban transportation network (MUTN) brings difficulties to citizens and urban planning. However, obtaining reliable and up-to-date spatial data is not an easy task. To address this problem, we propose a framework for creating a multimodal urban transportation network by integrating spatial data from heterogeneous sources. The framework standardizes the representation of different datasets through a common conceptual model for spatial data (schema matching), uses topological, geometric, and semantic information to find matches among objects from different datasets (data matching), and consolidated them into a single representation using data fusion techniques in a complementary, redundant and cooperative way. Spatial data integration makes it possible to use reliable data from official sources (possibly outdated and expensive to produce) and crowdsourced data (continuously updated and low cost to use). To evaluate the framework, a MUTN for the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte was built integrating authoritative and crowdsourced data (OpenStreetMap, Foursquare, Facebook Places, Google Places, and Yelp), and then it was used to compute routes among eighty locations using four transportation possibilities: walk, drive, transit, and drive–walk. The time and distance of each route were compared against their equivalent from Google Maps, and the results point to a great potential for using the framework in urban computing applications that require an integrated view of the entire multimodal urban transportation network.