Challenges

«Züri wie neu» is an online platform of the Zurich city administration in order to facilitate the reporting of damaged infrastructure by citizens. It went online in 2013. Since then it is moderated by the city administration and managed transparently with all – anonymized - reports available as open data.

The open dataset derived from «Züri wie neu» currently contains around 14’000 reports (!). It includes the exact georeferenced location of the infrastructure damage, the time of recording, the exact description, the categorisation, the processing status and the time when the report was completed. For approximately 1’700 messages, even transmitted photos can be referred to it. All data is available in open geo formats and can also be queried via the open interface Open311.

It is obvious that the spatial and temporal components of these data usually invite for geo analysis and cartographic visualisations, such as heatmaps or animated maps. But there might be further interesting facts hidden in the data. The precise descriptions of the damage written by the users seem especially interesting. Since it is unstructured text, an analysis for further facts is not trivial.

For the administration it would be very helpful for example, if the category of the detail description could be automatically derived from the text and/or a picture in order to be assigned to the responsible office. The dataset is thus well suited for machine-learning based classification techniques. Here you can find more information about this challenge.

Challenge Slack channel: #zueriwieneu.