Internet GIS and system dynamic modeling in urban public safety and security studies: A conceptual framework

Urban space has been a focus of various studies for centuries. In the awake of recent events, it becomes important to understand and model urban safety and security, and disseminate urban safety and security information to the decision-makers, the general public, and other interested parties in an efficient and dynamic way. This study embarks on such a task of proposing a system dynamic methodology based modeling technique, and an Internet GIS based information dissemination framework to address such an issue. In particular, we propose to establish a set of "urban safety and security information indicator system". Based on the actual scenario of Shanghai, such indicator system includes information from the urban socioeconomic development, urban crime and violence, urban tenure insecurity, and natural and manmade disasters. We will discuss its general framework and then give a thorough review of Internet GIS and its applicability to the urban safety and security domain. We conclude our research with proposed future works including data collection, modeling and simulation, and dissemination network creation.