Building urban LOD for solving illegally parked bicycles in Tokyo

Abstract

The illegal parking of bicycles is an urban problem in Tokyo and other urban areas. The purpose of this study was to sustainably build Linked Open Data (LOD) for the illegally parked bicycles and to support the problem solving by raising social awareness, in cooperation with the Bureau of General Affairs of Tokyo. We first extracted information on the problem factors and designed LOD schema for illegally parked bicycles. Then we collected pieces of data from Social Networking Service (SNS) and websites of municipalities to build the illegally parked bicycle LOD (IPBLOD) with more than 200,000 triples. We then estimated the missing data in the LOD based on the causal relations from the problem factors. As a result, the number of illegally parked bicycles can be inferred with 70.9% accuracy. Finally, we published the complemented LOD and a Web application to visualize the distribution of illegally parked bicycles in the city.We hope this raises social attention on this issue.