Alessio Antonini

Interactive Urban Maps for People with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This paper outlines the roadmap and the preliminary results of an interactive systems aimed at providing interactive urban maps tailored to people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It aims at involving ASDs in the design process to produce personalized services that can support their daily movements and task management, improving their autonomy and sense of agency.

MiraMap: A We-Government Tool for Smart Peripheries in Smart Cities

Increasingly over the last decade, there has been attention and expectations on the role that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions can play in increasing accountability, participation, and transparency in the public administration. In addition, attention to citizen participation is more and more at the center of the debate about smart cities. However, technological solutions have been often proposed without considering the first citizens needs and the sociotechnical misalignment within the city, i.e., in peripheral area. This paper outlines the design and implementation process of a we-government IT tool, called MiraMap. The project has been developed in the Mirafiori District in Torino (Italy), a neighborhood, which is characterized by the problems of marginality and by several undergoing urban transformations with a very high potential for social and economic development in the next few years. This makes Mirafiori Sud a valuable case study environment to experiment new methods and IT solutions to strengthen the connection between citizens and public administration. The object of MiraMap, indeed, is to facilitate communication and management between citizens and administration in reporting of issues and claims but also in submitting proposals. Collecting and handling of this information in an efficient way are crucial to improve the quality of life in urban suburbs, addressing more targeted and better performed public policies. In order to achieve those results, we combined First Life, a new local social network based on an interactive map, with a business process management system for easing reports about claims and proposals to be handled. The research process involves an interdisciplinary team, composed by architects, computer scientists, engineers, geographers, and legal experts, with the direct participation of local administrators and citizens.

Requirements of Legal Knowledge Management Systems to Aid Normative Reasoning in Specialist Domains

This paper discusses the challenges of legal norms in specialist domains - the interplay between industry/professional standards and legal norms, the information gap between legal and specialist domains and the need for interpretation at all stages of compliance - design, operation and justification. We propose extensions to the Eunomos legal knowledge management tool to help address the information gap, with particular attention to aligning norms with operational procedures, and the use of domain-specific specialist ontologies from multiple domains to help users understand and reason with norms on specialist topics. The paper focuses mainly on medical law and clinical guidelines.

SEeS@W: Internet of Persons meets Internet of Things for Safety at Work

SEeS@w faces the problem of safety in working environments in an innovative way, putting together objects and people, and the virtual and real word. We aimed at designing and developing a demonstrative prototype of an innovative ICT solution to monitor, evaluate and manage risks in a complex cooperative working environment. Data about risks are provided by workers themselves using interactive maps, according to the Internet of Persons paradigm. Maps are also fed by other data collected by networks of ambient and wearable sensors connected to the Internet, according to the Internet of Things paradigm. Maps display and bring all these data together, and can be therefore used by workers as a powerful instrument to coordinate people, manage risk issues, and improve safety at work. Thanks to the Living Lab methodology, we brought together the technical and human aspects of the project, testing the solution in terms of effectiveness, acceptability, usability and ergonomics.

First Life, the Neighborhood Social Network: a Collaborative Environment for Citizens

First Life is a platform for Computer Supported Cooperation aimed at fostering co-production (in the sense of the Nobel Prize Elinor Ostrom) and Do It Yourself initiatives, providing a virtual place connected via maps to the concrete reality.

FirstLife: From Maps to Social Networks and Back

Social network and web sharing sites represent a novel and ever-growing source of information that usually contains geographical information. In this chapter, we first present FirstLife, i.e. a specific social platform that has been recently awarded by a national-level competition in the “Smart Cities and Social Communities” context. FirstLife aims at fostering co-production (in the sense of the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom) and Do It Yourself initiatives, providing a virtual place connected via maps to the concrete reality. Thus, the platform by itself is intended to involve the different actors in developing new services, from institutions to associations, from citizens to enterprises. We propose a set of methodologies to face such complexity in terms of data management, integration and smart functionalities.

Foundations of Map-based Web Applications - A Survey of the Use, Limits and Opportunities Offered by Digital Maps

Traditional maps are one of the oldest way to express relevant information on a locality base, as synthetic representations of reality. The traditional visualization theory of maps and the related principles used to structure spatial information can inspire the modelling of new solutions in the field of information management in web application. But, the fast and generalized spreading of digital maps, and the related production of geo-localized social media is not followed by a deep integration of map in web applications, preventing the effectiveness of digital maps in solving pressing issues like aggregation, retrieval, recommendation and presentation of spatial media. Through the analysis of key concepts of maps, this contribution addresses the foundations of map-based applications, discussing the limits of current approaches and introducing new opportunities based on deep integration between maps and applications.

Back to public: Rethinking the public dimension of institutional and private initiatives on an urban data platform

Currently, both private and institutional actors are using the most common social networks to promote the public dimension of their work, but only big players can afford large investments for spreading their initiatives, practices or building a participatory process of any kind. The existing social networks have several limitations: they have been modelled on a personalistic logic centred on the individual and on his/her private life. On the other hand, information about initiatives and actions of public interest are shattered in institutional and private websites making impossible to depict what is happening in the city. This contribution addresses the design a public platform for public initiatives, opened to any kind of public players, from citizens to institutions, from non-profit organizations to companies. We present the outcomes of the scenario analysis and the participatory design process, showing how general requirements have been translated in design principles and functionalities available in the platform FirstLife.

Civic Social Network: A Challenge for Co-production of Contents About Common Urban Entities

Developing a civic social network requires to consider users meeting in real life, collaborating on digital entries related to real urban entities. This makes necessary to think about collaboration tools in a new perspective: ensuring the participation of users with different levels and forms of legitimacy to represent complex relations among entities, and ensuring the accountability of each contributor. We present a set of technical solutions allowing the collaboration on complex entities, keeping interactions simple, and representing multiple perspectives about shared entities.

The Construction of Models and Roles in Normative Systems

Roles are widely addressed in multi-agents systems with social norms but roles in legal systems are quite different. The relation between legal norms and roles have specific features that when comes to applications create a distance with the expectations from law practitioners. This paper analyse roles in legal systems with legal norms and present the extension of [1] about representing norms as social objects consenting the representation of the assignment of roles and the chain between principles, norms and roles.