Abstract
An approach for the automated consolidation of associated open and public data pertaining to the built environment in Singapore has been developed in this thesis. The motivation of the research stems from retrospective observation for the need of quality data across various fields and the difficulties in the gathering, cleaning, and enhancing such data for analysis and use. Noting the close interrelationships between the built environment with other research fields, this work will (1) demonstrate an approach in the gathering of open, private residential property transactional data and dataset of 21 other infrastructure-amenities from the internet, (2) batch look up its associated geographic coordinates, and (3) determine the distance of the closest amenity or n-average amenities from the listed residential property by walking and driving distances. These tools, in the manner presented, are envisioned to facilitate the discovery of new research insights and foster collaboration amongst a community of like-minded individuals. The consolidation of such datasets is envisioned to contribute to an open repository of building and infrastructure related data which will be coined as BuildingDataSG, thus reducing the time needed in the data preparation phase of any building research and analysis project. In an information infused and data driven age, having access to quality data is key in ensuring that downstream analyses provide useful, accurate and actionable information to researchers and end users. Our work will lay a foundation for cross and multi-disciplinary research related to the build environment, specifically in the fields of socioeconomics and healthcare where these datasets are highly relevant. Working Robotic Process Automation (RPA) scripts, Application programming interface (API) request scripts as well as Graphical user interface (GUI) and Command line interface (CLI) tools written for this project will be made public for anyone to use, contribute and further refine upon