| Abstract |
The concentration of people, companies, research organizations and other activities in urban areas is a key process in the development of economies and societies. In order to investigate how these urban systems function, the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) in collaboration with EC (European Commission) and Eurostat have introduced the concept of Functional Urban Areas (FUAs). FUAs consider factors beyond the predefined city boundaries to better reflect the economic geography of where people live and work and thereby support the design of better policies for different types of urban areas. This dynamic and multi-faceted definition of metropolitan areas demands integration of data from multiple up-to-date data sources in order to efficiently delineate FUAs. In this paper, we propose a Linked Data based approach, which combines openly available spatial and non-spatial resources on the Web to classify urban areas with the aim to more flexibly monitor urban development. |