Urban Informatics: Using Big Data for City Scale Analytics

Urban Informatics, the application of data science methodologies to the urban development and planning domain, has been increasingly adopted to improve the management and efficiency of cities. This paper introduces state of the art use cases in major cities including New York, London, Seoul and Amsterdam. It also introduces recent advances in using Big Data by multi-lateral institutions for poverty reduction, and startups utilizing open data initiatives to create new value and insights. Preliminary research performed on using Seoul's open data such as building permit data and health code violations are also introduced to demonstrate opportunities in this relatively new but promising area of research.