SensorWebBike A Participatory Environmental Urban Monitoring

Sustainable development and effective environmental policies are key to ensure public safety and health. People feel safer in their cities when national and local government are clearly committed with a better environmental governance, building public trust and transparency. Urban environmental monitoring is a driving force to set up continuous information services able to provide input for spatial decision support systems. Data have still a low interoperability, due to a lack of policy coordination and “closed” data infrastructures. But data, may be made available from different sources, as local and national infrastructures could be positively integrated by a participatory involvement of diverse stakeholders, including citizens. SensorWebBike is a real-time Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and web interface that seeks to tackle this challenge: setting up an open sensing and participative approach for urban environmental monitoring. Bikers becomes voluntary citizens-sensors able to measure environmental parameters, by using a small sensor’s box - an innovative low-cost mobile device - mounted on their bikes. Through General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) technology, the sensor transmits geolocated data on environment and air quality to the data server connected to the applications and web server, where real time observations are visualized in a web browser. The data are open and the whole system is compliant with geospatial standards throughout the entire process flow: from sensor data acquisition to web visualisation. The prototype has been tested in the city of Florence, and is online at [http://149.139.16.20:8080/bikeclimate/] where the geolocated measures, bike tracks and user-generated meta-data are visualized on a GIS mashup and shared automatically, contributing to build a comprehensive and constantly updated spatial representation of air quality pattern of the whole urban area. SensorWebBike opens environmental monitoring systems and data to the public, “augmenting” urban social interactions so to increase citizens’ awareness on air quality issues. The overall aim is to share a participatory monitoring tool for the collective environmental mapping, contributing to the building of the “intelligence data spots” of cities.