GENOR: A Generic Platform for Indicator Assessment in City Planning

Abstract

More and more data have been generated in city planning in the past few years. Clear visualizations of this data are helpful to support information comprehension and retention for urban practitioners and policy-makers. Much research has been carried out on modeling and integrating data, and different tools have been developed for visualizing urban data. However, such tools are generally application dependant and cannot address other problems. This work introduces GENOR, a generic platform for indicator assessment in city planning. It consists of a client-server application able to store and process any indicator and provide 2D and 3D map-based views for visualization. A game engine (Unity) was used to create the client application, and the server consists of a REST API and a DBMS. Two cases studies were conducted to show the use of the platform: walkability and bus service availability assessment, both in the city of Ålesund, Norway. Obtained results demonstrate that the platform is flexible as it can be tailored to different applications seamlessly.