Articoli taggati con ‘Internet of things’
What Big Data Is and How Can We Use It
In recent years, we have witnessed an exponential growth of the amount of data we are generating. As an example, consider the numbers depicted in Figure 1, that shows what happens in one minute in Internet, for both the years 2016 and 2017. In a single minute, approximately 150 million email are sent, 350 thousand new tweets appear in Twitter, and 40 thousand posts in Instagram, both in 2016 and in 2017. But the figure allows us also to see the impressive growth, in a single year, of some statistics: the search queries in Google raised from 2.4 to 3.5 million, video views in Youtube jumped from 2.78 to 4.1 million, and Uber Rides almost triplicated, from approximately 1300 to 3800. WhatsApp messages exchanged went from 20 to 29 million. There is an explosion of data, and the natural question is whether we can use it to improve our daily lives. We already witnessed some examples in which we can exploit the data: Google Maps has real time information about traffic data, and suggests us the fastest route available according to this info. Amazon knows what we bought, i.e., what we like, and can suggest us similar items based on shopping preferences of people that have similar tastes. Apple (and other companies) can recognize our friends in the pictures, that are geolocalized thanks to the built-in GPS in our smartphones, and helps us in retrieving and organizing them. We choose restaurants and hotels based on the feedback of thousands of customers in Tripadvisor. Big Data is already in our lives. In the following section, we will try to provide a better picture of what Big Data is. Then, the natural question become “How can we use it?”
Transforming Historical Cities in Smart Cities by Using Geospatial Technologies
The term geospatial in the Anglo-Saxon world – but also in the scientific and technical Italian elite – is slowly replacing the word Gis, acronym of Geographic Information System. Geospatial is interpreted as a synonym of geographical notions, in a system that can include more than two dimensions, normally represented by the latitude and the longitude, introducing geographical information in a landmark that could be developed in three, or, by now, also in four dimensions. The simplest examples are the google maps, which in the classical plane dimension of the chart sheet have put together the three-dimensional place with a fourth dimension time-slider. The impact of geospatial technology in our daily life has become rather relevant, showing itself as a global reference overview in our environment. The impact of all the innovations that form the Geospatial technology is increasing in our lives. It reached such a relevance to become a key point in our environment. This is particularly recognizable in urban envirornment, as it allow us in using Location Based Sevices technologies, which are able to transform every georeferenced object in a smart object, inserting it in a network of objects through position relationship among which the objects in the network transmit data and information each other. The common use of these networks of objects in our urban environment, could represent the structural network of the Smart Cities. When we use mobile devices in our trips, or when we share our feelings or other personal information on Social Network such as Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, we communicate also our geografical position (if we allowed it in our privacy agreement). Many of the services offered by search engines, using our position, are able in showing us restaurants, hotels, shops, banks, drugstores and everything we need, even classifying the showed results on the basis of the appreciation of other users. Thus, it is clear that geospatial technology is already present in the very core of our lives.
