Practical Information about Sustainable Mobility for Smart Cities
Paulo M. Araújo, Pedro M. Tendeiro and Porfírio P. Filipe
Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa, Rua Conselheiro Emídio Navarro, 1, 1959-007, Lisboa, Portugal
Keywords: Sustainable Mobility, FAQ, Question-answering, Public Transportation.
Abstract: One of the objectives of the European Commission is to improve sustainability and accessibility of collec-
tive transports, while simultaneously promoting the use of more environmentally friendly means of trans-
portation. In this scope, it is important to make available appropriate and updated information about the
mobility options offered by transport operators. With the objective of contributing to improve the quality of
information about mobility options, tendentiously more sustainable, it is argued that practical information
about transports, associated to domain entities (e.g. points of interest, transport authorities/operators and
events), should assume the form of a set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). For this, it is proposed an
information model to support the acquisition of FAQ’s answers from heterogeneous sources of information.
This work was developed in the context of the START European project (www.start-project.eu) as a service
for the Integra Social Network (integra.isel.pt) that is a product of the emergent Integra brand.
1 INTRODUCTION
One of the objectives of the European Commission
is to improve sustainability and accessibility of col-
lective transports, while simultaneously promoting
the use of more environmentally friendly means of
transportation. In this scope, it is important to make
available appropriate and updated information about
the mobility options offered by transport operators.
Public collective passenger transport has on most
cases poor quality or lack of information, and travel-
ers have difficulties in choosing the best mobility
options. This difficulty to access information affects
the quality of life and has impact on environmental
and economic costs.
In this context, we argue that a contribution to
existing mobility options is to provide practical
information to travelers in a form of Frequently
Asked Questions (FAQ) (Tendeiro and Filipe,
2011). We propose a system where information is
gathered from heterogeneous sources and is then
presented in a unified view. The proposed system
collects data through a Service Oriented Architec-
ture (SOA) and aggregates this data on a separate
central server (Crupi and Warner, 2008).
The validation of proposed model architecture is
based on an implemented demonstrator in the con-
text of Integra Social Network (ISN) (Antunes and
Costa, 2012), which enhances the contribution of the
High Institute of Engineering of Lisbon (ISEL) for
the European project Seamless Travel across the
Atlantic area Regions using Sustainable Transport
(START) (http://www.start-project.eu/)
2 PROJECT CONTEXT
This research work was made by ISEL in the context
of Seamless Travel across the Atlantic Regions
using sustainable Transport (START) project.
START Project is a European Commission’s Trans-
national Territorial Cooperation Program with 14
partners from Portugal, France, UK and Spain. The
main mission is the establishing of a transnational
network of regional & local authorities to promote
enhanced accessibility, giving tools to make easy to
travel to, from, and around the Atlantic regions,
using environmentally friendly, collective modes of
transport (Carris – Transportes Públicos Lisboa,
2011), greater interconnectivity between transport
systems, clearer information within regional gate-
ways, airport hubs ports and rail interchanges.
ISEL’s contribution on this project was the pro-
posed information model to support the acquisition
of FAQ’s answers from heterogeneous sources of
information and the data integration for multiple
244
M. Araújo P., M. Tendeiro P. and P. Filipe P..
Practical Information about Sustainable Mobility for Smart Cities.
DOI: 10.5220/0004408702440247
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Smart Grids and Green IT Systems (SMARTGREENS-2013), pages 244-247
ISBN: 978-989-8565-55-6
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
transportation sources. Implementing this model
allows the interrogation of multiple sources of in-
formation through a single Integra Social Network
interface. The main idea in this work is to give the
precise and useful information to travelers while
maintaining the access of multiple information
sources transparent to users.
The constructed model has some development re-
quirements that allows the deployment on cloud
environments (Schubert et al., 2010). The multiple
extern information sources with different technolo-
gies, implementations and interfaces has many chal-
lenges to integrate with our Integra Social Network,
and this cloud environments give a flexible way to
configure our system according to different needs.
Different public transportation systems and jour-
ney planners (BreizhGo, 2013) (Commentjyvais.fr,
2013) can be integrated with Integra Social Network
with total transparently to the end user. Also this
integration allows the creation of mobile systems
oriented for tourisms purposes, other main goal of
START project, where “low budget tourism” can be
guided, to reach POI (Points of Interest) or events by
public transportation (Ferreira et al., 2013).
2.1 Domain Entity Definition
The proposed model has several concepts defined to
allow information modeling based on a specific
main type, Entity. This base type is a set of specific
attributes and elements that define every physical
and conceptual components of the Integra domain.
Figure 1: Entity type model.
Every Integra entity implements the model presented
in
Fig, and therefore possesses unique and registered
identifiers, short and extended descriptions and a
flag to indicate if the entity is enabled. As for the
mandatory elements, it must only have a name. Ad-
ditional elements include sets of Uri references,
multimedia documents and finally the associated
practical information of the entity.
3 MODELING PRACTICAL
INFORMATION
The practical information is organized in three dis-
tinct parts, the header, the body and the footer as
shown in Fig.
Figure 2: Practical Information Model.
The header and the footer can be anything the ad-
ministrator deems useful to emphasize the body of
the practical information, for example a message to
the user, an introductory text, an image with a logo,
or even nothing at all.
The body of the practical information is consti-
tuted by a set of questions, presented in
Fig. A ques-
tion of this set possesses, besides attributes, a set of
domain concepts in form of keywords and the ver-
bose elements which constitutes the question, the
interrogative.
Figure 3: Question Model.
The attributes of a question are mainly the status of
the question, and optionally a unique identifier and
the default language.
The interrogative, which is presented in
Fig, is
composed by its text message and by its information
source, with or without its respective arguments, and
PracticalInformationaboutSustainableMobilityforSmartCities
245
by a set of answers. Each interrogative element of a
question has different languages, so each single
element contains the date of the last update and the
owner or responsible for its creation. By conceiving
a language dependent structure, it became possible
to find different answers for different languages.
The source elements indicate the resources from
where the answer is to be retrieved and the argu-
ments enable some degree of dynamism by allowing
the user or administrator to choose from them.
Figure 4: Interrogative Model.
In Fig is presented the structure of an answer. The
most relevant attributes are its type, the dates of
revision, update and expiring, and its status.
Figure 5: Answer Model.
The element set which composes an answer are
the owner of the answer, the used source of infor-
mation, a set of items which are multimedia ele-
ments such as images or text and optionally a set of
a socially typical likes and dislikes, regarding the
quality of the answer.
3.1 Example FAQ
Who examples of reusable questions are given in the
following table, where two contexts are used for the
same question.
Question
Answer
Train station Bus stop
Where to buy
ticket?
Ticket booth On board
When to
validate it?
In platform On board
4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
This work is a contribution to START project. The
constructed model and preliminary tests are promis-
sory. With this model it’s possible to integrate dif-
ferent external sources of information dynamically
and give travelers the precise and specific infor-
mation they need.
The Frequently Asked Questions’ approach per-
mits question and answer reutilization and which
can be an effective solution to the proposed prob-
lem. This question answering system allows trans-
parent integration into an existing solution so users
don’t have to use a different interface or access a
different system.
Our contribution is a new approach to question
and answering on a specific domain, the sustainable
transports, and provides useful information to users
on a Frequently Asked Questions basis and allows
integration with different public transportation in-
formation systems.
As for future work, it is expected to include this
system in the Integra Social Network’s Reputation
System, where the quality of the presented infor-
mation would be evaluated by users under typical
social network approach, through the use of
Like/Unlike.
REFERENCES
Antunes, D. and Costa, A. (2012). Integra Social Network.
Retrieved January 10,
2013, from http://integra.isel.pt
BreizhGo. Retrieved January 11, 2013, from http://
www.breizhgo.com
SMARTGREENS2013-2ndInternationalConferenceonSmartGridsandGreenITSystems
246
Carris – Transportes Públicos Lisboa, (2011).
Sustainability. Retrieved January 10, 2013, from
http://www.carris.pt/en/sustainability/
Commentjyvais.fr Retrieved January 11, 2013, from http://
commentjyvais.fr
Crupi, J., Warner, C. (2008 May). Enterprise Mashups
Part I: Bringing SOA to the People. SOA Magazine
Issue XVIII Retrieved January 5, 2013, from http://
www.soamag.com/I18/0508-1.php
Ferreira, J., Filipe, P. and Martins, P. (2013, May):
INTEGRA System, to appear in 9
th
International Con-
ference on Web Information Systems and Technolo-
gies, Aachen, Germany.
Merseytravel on behalf of the START Consortium. (2009
– 2013). START Project - Objectives. Retrieved Janu-
ary 14, 2013, from http://www.start-project.eu/
Official Journal of the European Union (2009) - Directive
2009/28/EC of The European Parliament and of The
Council of 23 April 2009
Schubert, L., Jeffery, K. and Neidecker-Lutz, B. (eds).
(2010). The Future of Cloud Computing – Report from
the first Cloud Computing Expert Working Group
Meeting. Cordis (Online), BE: European Commission.
Retrieved January 15, 2013 from http://cordis.
europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/docs/Cloud-report-final.pdf
Tendeiro, P., Filipe, P. (2011, November): Practical In-
formation on Sustainable Transport, Conference on
Electronics Telecommunications and Computers, Lis-
bon, Portugal;
PracticalInformationaboutSustainableMobilityforSmartCities
247
