The Birth of a Concept: Designing the Conceptual Framework of “Shahr Online”
The Birth of a Concept: Designing the Conceptual Framework of “Shahr Online”
From the book: City, Data, Intelligence
After that initial spark, I shared the idea with my wife and a close friend from my university years. It didn’t take long for our discussions to turn into a serious, structured research effort. Together, my wife and I began examining both domestic and international examples. For me, repeating what had already been done was never appealing; if something similar existed, I would have preferred to collaborate with them rather than start from scratch. In every project I have undertaken, my priorities have always been saving time, avoiding unnecessary consumption of human and financial resources, and preventing duplication of effort.
But the more we searched, the less we found. There was no comprehensive, cohesive, and locally adapted model available. So we decided to build it ourselves.
We drafted scenarios, designed models, and step by step, shaped the framework of an ambitious project. In our view, Shahr Online was far more than an app or a simple service platform; it was envisioned as an interactive, location-based, intelligent infrastructure for delivering urban services.
To simplify and organize these services, we divided the city into four primary domains:
Health
Business
Tourism
Culture & Arts
Our initial analysis showed that nearly all urban services could be categorized into two key dimensions:
Presentation (including text, images, map-based display, or virtual tours)
Transaction (including goods, time-based services such as appointments, or service delivery)
We aimed to design a dynamic analytical model—a framework capable of growing, learning, and adapting to different conditions. For this reason, the technical structure of the project was built around the principle of adaptability. Diagrams at conceptual, logical, and technical levels were drawn to define the architecture.
As a starting point, we selected the health sector as our top priority. Our focus centered on three essential services: physician listings, online appointment scheduling, and virtual consultations. We even included the idea of licensed online pharmaceutical sales in the first phase, although regulatory authorities ultimately did not grant approval for that component (the full details are discussed in Chapter Nine).
In parallel, we began collecting and analyzing citywide data. A database containing thousands of job titles was assembled and refined into a list of 300 essential professions, which were later organized into 24 main categories. These 24 groups aligned directly with the project’s four core domains: health, business, tourism, and culture & arts.
To enrich the dataset, we dispatched teams of interns to various urban centers to gather field data. After thorough analysis, this information became the foundation upon which the software infrastructure of Shahr Online was built.
Little by little, the project began to move from vision to reality—
but this was only the beginning of the journey.
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