Understanding the use of heterogenous data in tackling urban flooding: an integrative literature review

Data-driven approaches to urban flooding management require a comprehensive understanding of how heterogenous data are leveraged in tackling this problem. In this paper, we conduct an integrative review of related studies, and this is structured based on two angles: tasks and data. From the selected 69 articles on this topic, diverse tasks in tackling urban flooding are identified and categorized into eight categories, and heterogeneous data are summarized by their content type and source into eight categories. The links between tasks and data are identified by synthesizing what data are used to support the tasks in the studies. The task–data links are a many-to-many relationship in the sense that one particular data category supports multiple tasks, and one particular task uses data from multiple categories. The future research opportunities are also discussed based on our observations. This paper serves a signpost for researchers who wish to gain an overview of the heterogenous data and their use in this field and lays a foundation for studies that aim to develop a data-driven approach to tackle urban flooding.