Safe urban growth: An integrated ICT solution for unstandardized and distributed information handling

In 2007, our planet became predominantly urban as for the first time, more than half of the world's population was living in cities. This tendency for urbanization is characterized by urban sprawl phenomena and excessive environmental pollution degrading citizens' living standards. Although intelligent and safe urban planning and management is a challenging task, latest ICT advances can offer promising solutions to the aforementioned problem by providing efficient and effective ways for handling large amounts of unstandardized and distributed information. In this paper we present an integrated, fully automatic ICT solution for acquiring, processing and representing heterogeneous, unstandardized and distributed information about underground gas pipeline networks, in order to provide a safe way for urban growth.