The ubiquitous availability of datasets has spurred the utilization of Artificial Intelligence methods and models to extract valuable insights, unearth hidden patterns, and predict future trends. However, the current process of data collection and linking heavily relies on expert knowledge and domain-specific understanding, which engenders substantial costs in terms of both time and financial resources. Therefore, streamlining the data acquisition, harmonization, and enrichment procedures to deliver high-fidelity datasets readily usable for analytics is paramount. This paper explores the capabilities of SemTUI, a comprehensive framework designed to support the enrichment of tabular data by leveraging semantics and user interaction. Utilizing SemTUI, an iterative and interactive approach is proposed to enhance the flexibility, usability and efficiency of geospatial data enrichment. The approach is evaluated through a pilot case study focused on urban planning, with a particular emphasis on geocoding. Using a real-world scenario involving the analysis of kindergarten accessibility within walking distance, the study demonstrates the proficiency of SemTUI in generating precise and semantically enriched location data. The incorporation of human feedback in the enrichment process successfully enhances the quality of the resulting dataset, highlighting SemTUI’s potential for broader applications in geospatial analysis and its usability for users with limited expertise in manipulating geospatial data.

Many decisions in transportation management must be made before the uncertainty of possible traffic conditions is revealed. When making decisions with lasting implications over a medium to long timeframe, it is essential to consider not only the most probable scenario, possibly obtained through a forecasting model but also a range of potential outcomes. This approach allows for effective risk mitigation across a spectrum of scenarios, including less probable ones, and enhances the resilience of planning strategies. In this paper, we demonstrate the development of a generative model capable of learning the multivariate joint probability distribution of link speeds on a road network, using real data collected from sensors. The proposed model has shown its ability to generate scenarios that preserve correlations among variables, while producing samples that faithfully represent the empirical marginal distributions. To further enhance the performance of our Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model, we employed a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) for pre-training the generator network. Experimental results, conducted on three distinct benchmark datasets, highlight the potential of the proposed model in generating new scenario samples of multivariate variables. The Wasserstein distance between the generated distribution and the real data, confirms the good performance of our model with respect to state of the art models, based on copulae.

Urban computing techniques harnessing digital mobility traces can assume a pivotal role in comprehending travel patterns and behavioral dynamics within an urban context. These methodologies yield invaluable insights for transportation planners, enabling them to make informed decisions and augment the overall efficiency of urban transportation systems. The goal of this research is to analyze the parking phenomenon in urban areas and develop predictive models for parking-related indicators. Specifically, we introduce two quantitative metrics: the Average Parking Time and the Average Number of Simultaneously Parked Vehicles, aimed at characterizing parking activities from temporal and volumetric perspectives. A large collection of raw GPS traces from a sample of private cars in the metropolitan areas of Rome was used to investigate and model the spatiotemporal dynamics of parking demand and saturation on public streets. Our investigation entailed the application of a diverse array of Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques, encompassing statistical models, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), for the prediction of these indicator values. In our experiments, we found that the 3D-CLoST model excelled in accurately predicting parking indicators compared to other techniques. Interestingly, we also observed that statistical models were able to achieve performance levels that were similar to those of more complex models.

Data enrichment facilitates the creation of rich, expressive, and high-quality datasets, enabling valuable analytics and enhanced decision-making. The accurate geolocation of residential addresses and travel routes is crucial for determining the most appropriate locations of critical social infrastructure, such as educational and medical centres. This paper introduces an interactive semantic enrichment approach that enhances urban data by integrating high-quality geospatial information. The approach is supported by a modular and extensible data enrichment framework, which leverages existing geolocation services, enabling seamless data integration. Human-in-the-loop revision is employed to enhance the quality of geocoding results. A real-world pilot study conducted in Sofia, Bulgaria, was used to validate this approach, demonstrating its promising potential in addressing pressing issues in parametric urban planning.

Abstract Processing large-scale and highly interconnected Knowledge Graphs (KG) is becoming crucial for many applications such as recommender systems, question answering, etc. Profiling approaches have been proposed to summarize large KGs with the aim to produce concise and meaningful representation so that they can be easily managed. However, constructing profiles and calculating several statistics such as cardinality descriptors or inferences are resource expensive. In this paper, we present ABSTAT-HD, a highly distributed profiling tool that supports users in profiling and understanding big and complex knowledge graphs. We demonstrate the impact of the new architecture of ABSTAT-HD by presenting a set of experiments that show its scalability with respect to three dimensions of the data to be processed: size, complexity and workload. The experimentation shows that our profiling framework provides informative and concise profiles, and can process and manage very large KGs.

The problem of reliably predicting vehicle flows is paramount for traffic management, risk assessment, and public safety. It is a challenging problem as it is influenced by multiple factors, such as spatio-temporal dependencies with external factors (as events and weather conditions). In recent years, with the exponential data growth and technological advancement, deep learning has been adopted to approach urban mobility problems by addressing spatial dependency with convolutional neural networks and the temporal one with recurrent neural networks. We propose a spatio-temporal flow prediction framework, called 3D-CLoST, that exploits the synergy between 3D convolution and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to jointly learn the characteristics of the space-time correlation from low to high levels. To the best of our knowledge, no method currently proposes such a structure for this problem. The results achieved on the two real-world datasets show that 3D-CLoST can learn behaviors from the data effectively.