FOSS4G 2022 general tracks

In the city of Ferrara (Italy) Dedagroup Public Services and other partners are involved in AIR-BREAK project (https://airbreakferrara.net/) to implement a set of geo-ICT tools for supporting an improved identification and monitoring of urban air quality.
Different datasets from heterogeneous sources have been already interconnected and integrated in the Spatial Data Infrastructure of the Municipality of Ferrara, based on (geo)standard protocols for data interchange sourced by:
• 173 authoritative AQ monitoring stations from 3 regional environmental agencies, ARPAE Emilia-Romagna (52), ARPA Veneto (33) and ARPA Lombardia (88), for their own whole regional areas;
• 2 private AQ monitoring stations managed by private companies located in Ferrara;
• 14 new AQ monitoring stations installed by Lab Service Analytica (project partner) in the territory of Ferrara
For integrating and sharing dynamic hourly data about air quality and other themes, we adopted the OGC Sensor Things APIs (STA) as the reference standard protocol [1].
STA is based on the OGC/ISO 19156:2011 [2] and provides an open and unified framework to interconnect IoT sensing devices, data, and applications over the Web. It is an open standard addressing the syntactic interoperability and semantic interoperability of the Internet of Things. It complements the existing IoT networking protocols such CoAP, MQTT, HTTP, 6LowPAN. While the above-mentioned IoT networking protocols are addressing the ability for different IoT systems to exchange information, STA is addressing the ability for different IoT systems to use and understand the exchanged information.
In AIR-BREAK project, FROST solution (FRaunhofer Opensource SensorThings-Server) [3] has been deployed in the GIS server farm of the Municipality of Ferrara to complement Geoserver and other technologies already providing services for viewing/accessing data based on OGC standards.
Indeed, among the final objectives of the project, the implementation of a standard-based Air Quality Data Infrastructure focuses on:
1. creating a bi-lateral and cooperative communication systems between authorities and citizens about air quality and its perception;
2. defining and implementing a multi-stakeholder Data Infrastructure on Air Quality to integrate existing/heterogeneous/dynamic data from both authoritative sources and crowdsourced by citizens (Rete di Monitoraggio Ambientale Partecipativo [4]);
3. providing such dynamic air quality data to local authorities involved monitoring (i.e. Municipality of Ferrara, ARPAE, Regione Emilia-Romagna) and to citizens, through standard APIs (STA) and with open licenses through the upcoming open data portal of Ferrara (June 2022);
4. testing and validating innovative solutions for air quality monitoring using in-situ IoT sensors and satellite remote sensing (e.g. Copernicus)

References:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SensorThings_API
[2] https://www.iso.org/standard/32574.html
[3] https://github.com/FraunhoferIOSB/FROST-Server
[4] https://rmap.cc/

The challenges posed to the current urban mobility model by pollution-related and urbanisation issues have resulted in significantly increasing the importance of urban resilience. Mobility management, pandemics’ spreading, equal access to services and climate crisis are just some of the crucial issues that falls within the definition of urban resilience.
One very promising solution aiming to solve many of these issues has been presented in 2016 by Professor Carlos Moreno under the name of “15-minutes city”. The paradigm is based on the idea that every citizen should be able to reach the essential services (supermarkets, shops, parks, etc) walking not more than 15 minutes from their home. The model is being tested in some metropolitan cities around the world (e.g. Paris).
However, reorganizing the city so that it presents a 15-minutes structure is not an easy task. It requires large resources and a careful planning based on data, to make sure that the project undertaken will actually have a positive effect on the urban mobility and no asset is wasted on useless projects.
The Business Innovation team of Dedagroup Public Services used Open Street Map data to develop an index to detect the local level of proximity within the city, showing both the areas that already conform to the 15 minutes model and the ones that do not, where taking action would improve the quality of life of the citizens living there.
The presentation will be focused on this proximity index, describing the assumptions behind its definition, such as the choice of city services to be considered essential, the nature of the road network used to compute walking distances and the area tiling chosen for the task.
The index will be then showcased on the city of Florence, together with an analysis of the city from a proximity point of view and a what if scenario: how would the index change if the municipality (and other relevant stakeholders) decided to make interventions on low proximity areas?
The case of Ferrara will be also presented to show that the proximity index can be the basis for further analyses: coupling the index with resident population count can help to spot the areas that are both under-served and highly populated, that are the ones where more people would benefit from improvements.