Kitchin, Rob and Stehle, Sam (2021) Can Smart City Data be Used to Create New Official Statistics? Journal of Official Statistics, 37 (1). pp. 121-147. ISSN 2001-7367

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Abstract

In this article we evaluate the viability of using big data produced by smart city systems for creating new official statistics. We assess sixteen sources of urban transportation and environmental big data that are published as open data or were made available to the project for Dublin, Ireland. These data were systematically explored through a process of data checking and wrangling, building tools to display and analyse the data, and evaluating them with respect to 16 measures of their suitability: access, sustainability and reliability, transparency and interpretability, privacy, fidelity, cleanliness, completeness, spatial granularity, temporal granularity, spatial coverage, coherence, metadata availability, changes over time, standardisation, methodological transparency, and relevance. We assessed how the data could be used to produce key performance indicators and potential new official statistics. Our analysis reveals that, at present, a limited set of smart city data is suitable for creating new official statistics, though others could potentially be made suitable with changes to data management. If these new official statistics are to be realised then National Statistical Institutions need to work closely with those organisations generating the data to try and implement a robust set of procedures and standards that will produce consistent, long-term data sets.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2020 Rob Kitchin et al., published by Sciendo This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ie/. Cite as: Kitchin, Rob and Stehle, Samuel. "Can Smart City Data be Used to Create New Official Statistics?" Journal of Official Statistics, vol.37, no.1, 2021, pp.121-147. https://doi.org/10.2478/jos-2021-0006
Keywords:	Big data; transport; environment; data quality; key performance indicators;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute, MUSSI
Item ID:	14634
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.2478/jos-2021-0006
Depositing User:	Prof. Rob Kitchin
Date Deposited:	22 Jul 2021 16:07
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of Official Statistics
Publisher:	Sciendo
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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