Urban Computing

Talking about Urban Computing is talking about urban spaces, the technologies that are embedded on them and the inhabitants.

An urban space contains urban equipments and people, using implicitly or explicitly those equipments. Beyond that, an urban space also contains social protocols, typical behaviors, conventions and other intangible values, which altogether turn it into a complex environment.

This environment is a rich information medium, where even people mobility can provide us with useful information, depending only on the goals and objectives of the analysis.

This way and, as long as an automatic interpretation of the space semantics is available, it is possible to extract knowledge from the space. Such knowledge extraction, much more important than raw information, is the final purpose of urban computing, allowing a better interaction between people and spaces.