Managing Road Safety through the Use of Linked Data and Heat Maps

Road traffic injuries are a critical public health challenge that requires valuable efforts for effective and sustainable prevention. Worldwide, an estimated 1.2 million people are killed in road crashes each year and as many as 50 million are injured. An analysis of data provided by authoritative sources can be a valuable source for understanding which are the most critical points on the road network. The aim of this paper is to discover data about road accidents in Italy and to provide useful visualization for improving road safety. Starting from the annual report of road accidents of the Automobile Club of Italy, we transform the original data into an RDF dataset according to the Linked Open Data principles and connect it to external datasets. Then, an integration with Open Street Map allows to display the accident data on a map. Here, the final user is able to identify which road sections are most critical based on the number of deaths, injuries or accidents.