open data platform

Case in point, the City of Chicago. One person, one laptop, and MongoDB’s technology jumpstarted a project that, with other people joining in, went from prototype to one of the nation’s pioneering projects to analyze and act on municipal data in real time. In just four months. Called WindyGrid, this system is an intelligent operations platform built on MongoDB. What makes WindyGrid exceptional isn’t just that it pulls together seven million different pieces of data from city departments every day.

Copenhagen, Denmark, is aggressively moving towards becoming a smart, carbon-neutral city by 2025. To achieve this goal, the city is initiating smart city programs such as smart lighting, sensor-based traffic management, intelligent building management and more. Up to now, data from individual smart city initiatives has been kept in silos. Copenhagen and Hitachi have joined forces to launch an integrated data service to eliminate these silos.

SMART SANTANDER project, which has been developed by several companies and institutions including Telefonica I+D and University of Cantabria, aims at designing, deploying and validating in Santander and its environment a platform composed of sensors, actuators, cameras and screens to offer useful information to citizens. 750 Waspmotes have been deployed to monitor different parameters such as noise, temperature, luminosity and CO.

The Open & Agile Smart Cities initiative (OASC) is a city-driven, non-profit organisation. The overall objective is to create a Smart City market. OASC was founded in January 2015 and came to life with the first wave of cities joining in March 2015. OASC continues to grow.

The Mayor's Office of Data Analytics (MODA) is New York City's civic intelligence centre. MODA aggregates and analyses data from across city agencies to more effectively address public safety, and quality of life issues. The office uses analytical tools to prioritise risk more strategically, deliver services more efficiently, enforce laws more effectively and increase transparency. For example, during Hurricane Sandy, which displaced an eighth of NYC's population, the city's response was managed through analytics.

The municipal geographic information system, iView, makes spatial information available to the public in a large number of spheres: engineering, transportation, community, tourism, education, art, and more.
As a resident of the city, you can view all the geographic information relevant to your neighborhood: preschools, schools, public gardens, pharmacies, community centers, outdoor sculptures, etc.
As an engineer, you can locate blocs, parcels, electricity and water infrastructures, and view a particular zoning plan and its associated documents.

As part of the city's policy to promote the accessibility and transparency of the information provided to the general public, the Municipality allows direct access to municipal databases that are not of a confidential nature. The environment enables the public and app developers to make use of information in municipal databases that deal with community affairs, culture, public health, budgets, statistical data and security. Recently Tel Aviv lunched a new Open Data site, The datasets are available in OpenData TLV, free to read, analyze and download.

The City of Vienna has committed itself to the concept of Open Government Data – an open and transparent system that makes city data available to the public for their further use. The city administration has thus decided to its open data records to the population, businesses and the scientific community. Relevant data range from statistics and geographic data or traffic and transport to economic figures. Personal data are strictly excluded from the Open Data concept. The main prerequisite for data to be included is their machine readability in open formats.

The goal of this project is to make a platform for collecting new types of urban and social mobility records available to the researchers of the IMU community, to deepen their research and validate their hypotheses and models. Many communities seek to improve their understanding of urban mobility behaviours: scientific communities (sociologists, philosophers, geographers, economists, urban planners, logisticians and computer programmers), territorial communities, transportation organisation agencies, businesses, etc. However, these records comprise sensitive personal data.

At Future Cities Catapult, we are working on the Hyper Connected Data Rich City project to create the governance, financial and policy instruments required to deliver a programme of city scale commercial demonstrators in the UK. This would allow new innovative products and services to be tested at scale, based on transformative digital technologies like next generation telecoms technology. It will enable UK companies to prove the business cases for highly innovative new products and services.