Interactive Maps of Chorems Explaining Urban Contexts to Align Smart Community’s Actors

The actualization of the three pillars of the Open Government paradigm, namely transparency, participation and collaboration, motivates the importance for a smart city administration to share decisions with citizens to receive real support and legitimize the decisions made. A way to engage citizens is to make available government data as open. This allows achieving a higher transparency in decision-making that also fosters citizens to support the strategic objectives of the city and improve the individual and collective quality of life. The goal of this paper is to show the effectiveness of chorems as a communication and support tool for understanding the dynamic realities of a territory. When used to visually synthesize urban contexts, maps of chorems can produce a territorial schematic representation, which eliminates details not useful to the map comprehension, and emphasizes relevant information to enable decision makers, experts and ordinary citizens to share knowledge about complex phenomena occurring in urban areas. A use case is built, which describes how the urban heat island phenomenon and the factors involved in its development are analyzed through a set of chorems and operators. This phenomenon is invisible but typically present in most of the modern cities. It is composed of different urban elements present on the urban territory and its understanding implies technical and scientific knowledge not common among citizens and administrators. By visually interacting with chorems, it is possible support data manipulation by expert users, and data interpretation by citizens, thus aligning the different actors of a smart community towards a shared sustainability goal.