Even Smarter Data: Using Crowdsourcing to Improve Accessibility in Real-Time: A Smart Data Framework to Provide Live Updates for Public Transport Accessibility

摘要

Smart cities initiatives introduce the challenge of a more inclusive society that provides equal opportunities. Nevertheless, there are not many systems or apps designed to generate routes in the public transport for people with special needs. For instance, Google Maps is often used to calculate routes and find points of interest. However, it does not provide detailed information regarding specific facilities such as accessibility in transit. Even worse, it is not easy to find, to download or even to process specific and detailed accessibility information, in order to develop services for users. In this paper, we propose a smart data framework able to manage accessibility data in public transport and provide such user-level services. Moreover, this framework is also able to deal with real-time information by gathering notifications about incidents in the transport network. These data are obtained in a crowdsourcing process, and provides live updates for information, so that they can be used to recalculate accessible routes. In order to illustrate the process, we describe a case study with which we validate the framework, consisting of a smart app to generate accessible subway routes and to notify accessibility incidents.