Signals (Public Space Reports)

Municipality of Woensdrecht

If something needs to be made or cleaned up in the public space, it can be reported to the municipality as a 'Report of Public Space' via Signalen, the open source reporting system for and by municipalities.

Last change on 9th of April 2025, at 12:23 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Other algorithms
• Impact assessment: Field not filled in.
• Status: In use

General information

Theme

• Space and Infrastructure
• Public Order and Safety

Begin date

01-2023

Contact information

[e-mail]

Link to publication website

https://meldingen.woensdrecht.nl/incident/beschrijf

Responsible use

Goal and impact

If something needs to be fixed or cleaned up in public spaces, it can be reported to the municipality through Signalen, the online reporting system. A dangerous traffic situation or nuisance from people and catering establishments can also be reported. Previously, people had to choose which category their report fitted best (e.g. 'nuisance' or 'street furniture'), so that the report went to the right department in the municipality. But the municipality is a complex organisation and the list of categories is long. As a result, people did not always choose the right category. This sometimes caused delays in processing notifications. Therefore, we now use an algorithm that recognises words, e.g. 'rubbish' and 'pavement'. On this basis, it determines which category the report best fits and which team should handle it. So the caller no longer has to choose a category, and the call is handled faster because it goes to the right team.

Considerations

Field not filled in.

Human intervention

All calls that are categorised with less than 40% certainty are forwarded to the Customer Contact Centre (CCC). A human assessment then takes place and the call is still categorised. Reports that are wrongly forwarded to an incorrect category are also manually placed in the correct category by the KCC staff.

Risk management

There are few risks in this algorithm. It places a notification in the right category and gets it to the right team faster. If the algorithm cannot place a notification in a category with sufficient certainty, it ends up in the 'Other' category. KCC staff review those calls and manually put them in the right category. If the algorithm does not work properly, it therefore takes a little longer for the report to reach the right team. The reporter can add personal data if he or she wants to be kept informed. This data is stored securely and not used by the algorithm.

Operations

Data

Notification texts are used for the algorithm. While making a report, the reporter can choose to leave a phone number or e-mail address on a new page, but this information is only used for providing feedback on status changes. This information is not kept longer than necessary for this purpose, nor is it used for the algorithm.

Technical design

The text of the notification is broken down into individual words. Each word from a notification is analysed to see how unique it is to that notification, set against the total collection of words ('TF-IDF' or 'term frequency-inverse document frequency'). As a result, a word like 'the' or 'thank you' gets a low weight and a word like 'rubbish' gets a higher weight.

From that combination of words, logistic regression (a machine-learning technique) is then used to determine which category the report belongs to and thus which team within the municipality the report is most likely to fit.

External provider

Signalen was developed by the City of Amsterdam and made available as open source software. Technical application management is handled by Delta10; hosting is done through Equalit.