We're building better indicator frameworks for smart cities.
An indicator is just a column of data, typically persistent over time and coming from a stable source or set of sources.
Indicator frameworks are just sets of indicators. Every dashboard, every BI tool, and every performance measurement framework (like CITYKeys or ISO 37120) is an example of an indicator framework. They have three main uses: (1) to communicate quantitative information and strategic priorities to a wide audience, (2) to enable policy reactions to data, especially in the optimization of processes, and (3) to restrict a ention to a set of ‘relevant’ indicators—thus discarding the information from many other, ‘non-relevant’ indicators.
Indicator frameworks are among the simplest examples of scientific models based on data. Our research looks at the foundations of these models, with an eye toward enriching and automating the process of constructing real-world frameworks for cities and the organizations that serve them.
Read the slides from GCTC 2017.
Our idea: instead of constructing indicator frameworks expensively and internally, meaning indicator-by-indicator, we can specify them abstractly and externally, by means of their causal and statistical relationships to other, already-extant sets of indicators. Our approach is especially suited to situations where heterogeneous data is distributed across many projects and many localities.
More technically: data is most valuable when it is joined with other data, but how do we join and compare data from disparate, non-overlapping sources? We can do so “under a model”.
The indicator frameworks research team conducts original scientific research on indicator frameworks, and works to disseminate our findings to the smart cities community.
You can read the original workshop paper, presented at SCOPE 2017, here: workshop paper.
The research team was formed in Summer 2016 by Sokwoo Rhee, director of the Global Cities Team Challenge (GCTC) program at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). Its current members include:
If you are interested in applying or contributing to this research, or have any other questions, please contact us here.