A Visual Analytics System for the Analysis of City Indicators based on Multivariate Indices

With the Regional Council’s adoption of HRM’s Social Policy Framework (2020) and the Public Safety Strategy (2017), Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) committed to advancing community safety and wellbeing as vital outcomes. To be effective, these outcomes must be measurable, and bring transparency to the impacts of municipal programs, services, and policies. Experts from various HRM Business Units convened a working group with leading researchers in social policy and data visualization and analytics at Dalhousie University to explore solutions to support this process. The resulting tool was a prototype to develop composite indices that combine sets of city indicators to represent abstract concepts, such as safety or wellbeing. The present proposal aims to advance this prototype offering more analytical power to support evaluating the impact of concrete variables (some influenced by the municipality actions) on abstract concepts (e.g., wellbeing) while adding new stakeholders (and their data sets) into the process.

Faculty Supervisor:

Fernando Paulovich;Evangelos Milios

Student:

Partner:

Halifax Regional Municipality

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Public administration

University:

Dalhousie University

Program: