Towards building an integrated information platform for eco-city

Building a liveable eco-city involves a great variety of aspects related to a city. The ultimate goal is to pursuit the harmonic development between humanity environment and physical condition. In order to construct an eco-city effectively, the government needs to understand and grasp the policies and pubic opinions, to learn and draw advanced technology and experience, and to alert and solve emergent accidents, events and situations. This requires the city administrators to be timely aware of as much as helpful, referential and valuable information, so that they could make the scientific judgment and the right decision. In this paper, we target to develop an integrated information support and service platform, Eco-Intelligence, to meet such diverse and complex information needs. The platform collects extensive information about eco-planning, eco-building, eco-environment and eco-economics etc., and deals with heterogeneous forms of information in a unified way, including text, audio, image and video. It further integrates advanced visualization techniques to promote information utilization, interaction as well as consumablity. Our Eco-Intelligence can offer powerful information support for local government to build an eco-city, and can also make a solid preparation on data and knowledge for eco-city research. © 2010 IEEE.