ABSTRACT
Improving urban and regional outcomes through big data requires not only advances in data science, but also a new cohort of entrepreneurial professionals to work within governments, nonprofits and other organizations. These professionals will link big data advances with urban management, planning and decision making through initiatives in open data , applied data analysis, civic technology , PSSs, indicators systems and more. Inspired by ideas on informatics from the medical field, this chapter proposes the term urban informatics to describe the knowledge required for such initiatives. The field is defined as containing three primary knowledge areas (urban application domains, basic informational science and implementation), each of which is divided into two secondary areas. Six recent job postings in the field contain requirements for knowledge in all, or nearly all, of the six secondary areas, and the positions are within contexts where all six types of knowledge are present. The proposed definition can be used to design professional education curricula, to help organizations utilize new information technologies and to foster networking within an emerging field.
