MetaExplorer: Collaborative development of urban metabolism platform for decision making support

Cities need to improve sustainability levels demanded by climate change mitigation efforts. The use of big data analytics is crucial for understanding its dynamics and deploying solid public policies. Nevertheless, data availability poses great challenges, being difficult to produce reliable analyses. Delivering trustable cross sectorial energy datasets with high spatial and temporal resolution is thus critical to provide valuable insights for informed policymaking. This paper describes the MetaExplorer, a GIS-platform, which gathers trustable energy-related datasets, at municipal level for Portugal, providing a user-friendly georeferenced visualisation tool that can be used to derive statistical models, and support policymaking. Publicly available data was collected and cleaned, divided on five thematic areas: energy demand, buildings, mobility, waste management, and socio-economic, while a visualisation tool was developed to provide the possibility to further explore relations between indicators and support the energy transition at local level, delivering customised analyses with a global perception.