SORA

SORA is a social-spatial research data infrastructure designed to link social-science and spatial-science datasets for studying environmental justice, public health, well-being, and social participation. The project addresses the growing need to understand how environmental stress, urban change, and spatial conditions shape everyday life and social inequality.

Problem definition

Environmental pressures are increasing, and the interactions between human actions and the environment require more sophisticated analysis. Social-science research has long explored questions around environmental justice, public health, and well-being, yet these topics remain difficult to study in a spatially explicit and longitudinal way. Important questions remain unanswered: how do subjective perceptions of environmental stress influence individual and collective outcomes, which factors mediate these relationships, and how do citizens experience long-term spatial changes such as densification and urban sprawl?

A major barrier is the lack of interoperable infrastructures that connect survey data with spatial research data. Challenges include technical incompatibilities across disciplines, complex legal frameworks related to data protection, and methodological difficulties in applying GIS-based approaches to heterogeneous datasets.

Objectives

The project aims to establish or expand social and spatial research infrastructures to improve interoperability using international standards and framework requirements. It also seeks to develop innovative analytical tools, including cognitive apps, that can jointly investigate data from both domains.

Research questions

SORA explored several core questions:

• Which current questions in environmental justice are most relevant, and which new issues emerge at the intersection of social and spatial sciences?
• Which infrastructures need to be built or expanded to address these questions, and how can existing systems be networked to reflect state-of-the-art information science and technology?
• Can newly developed concepts and models be transferred to other scenarios and research domains?

Methodology

The infrastructure focuses on the development of a data platform for “small-scale information on settlement and open space structure.” This includes search, download, and processing services, as well as the addition of indicators describing current and past residential environments, with a particular emphasis on land use. The project also enables free-form analysis of original digital landscape models and integrates these data services with a cognitive application designed to support interdisciplinary research.

This combination of interoperable data infrastructure, analytical services, and domain-specific research tools creates a foundation for more robust and spatially informed investigations of human-environment relationships.