News

News related to the Urban Opus Project or open data in general.

Smart City applications – using a fog computing approach

While the majority of Smart City applications can be developed and deployed using traditional approaches, researchers are investigating how a new class of large scale, dynamic applications can leverage the power of Fog Computing, to build and deploy applications that are distributed throughout the smart city running on a variety of devices ranging from city servers, down to embedded computers in traffic signals and light posts. As part of a longer term research project, Urban Opus has been working with…

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Urban Opus joins the Urban Technology Allliance (UTA)

The Urban Opus Society has begun discussions to join the Urban Technology Alliance (UTA), a new organization having focused on helping cities, industry and academia accelerate Smart City ideas from poC to viable and sustainable service. Urban Opus will be present at the launch and has committed to provide leadership in the development of data brokerage solutions enabling the harmonization open, corporate and citizen data streams. UTA is a global non-profit organization providing city-scale testbeds from all around the world,…

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The case for a Smart City Data Brokerage

Central to the mission of Urban Opus has been the idea of a citizen centric data brokerage – a means for citizens to take control of their data and manage who uses it and how they use it. A data brokerage works by allowing anybody to make their data available, and then to offer that data to others in a controlled manner. Data brokerage versus open data You hear a lot about open-data in the smart city community, data that…

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Smart City Data Brokerage: lessons from Copenhagen

A city data brokerage is the next step for open data and provides a means for individuals and organisations to publish, buy, sell and trade data. It provides an essential level of trust and control to encourage organizations to make available high value data sets. It also offers a framework in which individuals can begin to share and control access to their personal data. One of the forefront cities in exploring this concept is Copenhagen, who have deployed a trial…

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Smart Cities: Technology Trends (Part 3)

Smart Cities: technology trends (Part 3) Follow @rodgerlea Recently I’ve been asked to write a technology trends paper for the IEEE looking at the main technology trends affecting Smart Cities. This is a broad topic, covering a lot of ground and I’ve been forced to pick a subset of technology trends that are affecting the evolution of smart cities. I’ve broken the topic into manageable sections – each a single blog post – as follows: PART 1 Smart cities: background and…

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Smart Cities: Technology Trends (Part 2)

Smart Cities: technology trends (Part 2) Follow @rodgerlea Recently I’ve been asked to write a technology trends paper for the IEEE looking at the main technology trends affecting Smart Cities. This is a broad topic, covering a lot of ground and I’ve been forced to pick a subset of technology trends that are affecting the evolution of smart cities. I’ve broken the topic into manageable sections – each a single blog post – as follows: PART 1 Smart cities: background and…

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Smart Cities: Technology Trends (Part 1)

Smart Cities: technology trends (Part 1) Follow @rodgerlea Recently I’ve been asked to write a technology trends paper for the IEEE looking at the main technology trends affecting Smart Cities. This is a broad topic, covering a lot of ground and I’ve been forced to pick a subset of technology trends that are affecting the evolution of smart cities. I’ve broken the topic into manageable sections – each a single blog post – as follows: PART 1 (this blog) Smart cities:…

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LoRaWAN – An IoT Urban Innovations Platform

One of the challenges with achieving smart city goals, especially involving citizen participation, is that it isn’t yet easy, or cheap, to get everyday urban things to talk to the Internet.  There’s a variety of staging technologies including Bluetooth, NFC, RFID, WiFi and cellular, but each has a significant range, reliability, or cost limitation. For example, if I’m a citizen and for whatever reason I want to talk to my bicycle over the Internet, or I run a small company and…

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Visualizing crime in Vancouver, BC

We created a couple of simple visualizations for the Vancouver crime data (open data) There’s a viz showing crime rates from 2003-2016 with an ability to look at specific types of crime for specific years. A second viz shows an interactive visualization of the 2016 crime statistics for Vancouver with a map of the crime’s location. We use Tableau for these visualizations – a full set is available on the Urban Opus tableau page

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Electric Vehicles and the Smart City – energy impact and usage

Take-up of Electric Vehicle   Electric vehicles are coming – worldwide growth rates are picking up with China leading the world. However the implications for smart cities, in terms of increased electricity demand, smart grid infrastructure and CO2 abatement are not as simple as you’d think.       As shown below (From EV columes.com), global monthly sales are now at 70,000 vehicles. Not a lot compared to global sales of regular cars, but it’s now significant and growing rapidly.  …

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