A data visualization solution for the smart city to exploit environmental data by means of 3d buildings

The modern age of Big Data, mostly leveraged by the consolidation of the IoT paradigm, leads to the need of giving meaning to the great amount of data, especially within the smart city. It is fundamental to extract value from the information we all are submerged in, thus motivating and supporting the decisions within our cities, which nowadays need transparency and practical evidence. Data visualization tools provide multiple perspectives and are meant to support decision makers, mining available data, with the help of graphical representations in order to ease the emersion of added value, as an initial point from which making inference, reasoning and simulation within our urban environments. And nonetheless, good data visualization provide intuitive evidence. In this paper we introduce a novel 3D urban data analysis framework for the smart city, which exploits the city itself and its buildings to convey data visualization. The novelty is realized thanks to a dynamic geographic tiling which binds the real city structure and the environmental data "on the fly", giving the opportunity to see the city changing as the data change. A prototype is proposed, which is based on a micro service architecture, open standards, and an immersive 3D map, aiming to support public decision makers in the process of environmental data analysis. To this extent, the current solution is built on the idea of replicability, accessibility and adaptation: it is location agnostic and does not depend on the particular position where the analysis takes place, it does not need human intervention or adjustments, once the services are instanced, and it is easily accessible, for the interface it is built on a web application.