News related to the Urban Opus Project or open data in general.
CKAN is a popular data repository used by many Open Data projects and widely used in a number of Smart Cities. Here in Canada, we use CKAN as part of the Urban Opus data hub. The Urban Opus Smart City hub has been running for over 2 years. The details of its design can be found in the technical paper but it basically consists two core components, CKAN as a document repository and an IoT platform (WoTKit) used for time series data as…
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Final report from Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) on the Canadian Smart City Mission to Europe Earlier in the year, we participated in the Canadian Smart City mission to Europe, we blogged about the event here. The Mission was organized by the Candian Research Council (NRC) and they have recently released their official mission report. You can read the full report here: EUREKA Canada Smart Cities Mission April 2016_Mission Report Highlights Mission Objectives Establish new EUREKA projects in Smart Cities…
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Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) has identified Cities of the Future as a game-changing technology and economic opportunity. Following a national dialogue, an Executive Summit was held in Toronto on March 31, 2016, resulting in an important summary report that will become the seed for Canadian R&D strategy in this sector. The conclusion so far is that the opportunity for Canada is to muster leadership in the following three areas (in order): Better Infrastructure and Infrastructure Management Efficient Transportation; and Renewable Energy The…
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Call For Papers: The Second International Workshop on Smart Cities: People, Technology and Data Workshop Homepage: http://www.ht.sfc.keio.ac.jp/iwsc16/ August 18th 2016 (PST): Abstract Submission Deadline August 25th 2016 (PST): Full paper submission September 15th, 2016 (PST): Acceptance Notification October 14th, 2016 (PST): Camera-ready Due December 13th, 2016 : Workshop Day The 2nd International Workshop on Smart Cities: People, Technology and Data will be held in conjunction with the 2016 ACM International Conference on Middleware (Middleware2016) in Trento, Italy on December 12th…
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Urban Opus is a partner in a new Canadian national research project looking at how data can benefit rural communities. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of ‘smart city’ projects occur in large urban centers. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the unfortunate perception that rural cities, towns and villages have less cash, capacity and incentive for data solutions. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, while large cities seek economic benefit from the smart management of the internal complexity of…
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Trying to make sense of Smart City standardization activities Follow @rodgerlea Updated Jan 2017. You may be interested in my article on Technology Trends affecting Smart Cities which includes a discussion of Smart City Standards. Update Nov. 2016: This blog has been turned into an article for the IEEE standards online Magazine, read it here Recently I’ve been trying to get a handle on Smart City standards for an IEEE trend paper I’ve been asked to write on Smart Cities.…
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In preparation for some workshops Urban Opus has created a poster (below) to illustrate the how open, proprietary and citizen data co-exist in smart cities intent on effective public engagement. The key insight is that most cities currently have completely unbalanced priorities related to the Inform, Consult, Involve and Observe interaction channels with their citizens through data. Healthy, smart cities will seek to cultivate an evolving, transparent balance. ESRI has separately classified citizen engagement into seven categories as follows: Public Information, Public Reporting,…
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Bribery, or perhaps it’s better described as clever bartering, is at the heart of a number of Smart City applications. I came across a lovely example of it recently in a service from Glasgow city aimed at improving energy efficiency for the city. The planners wanted to develop a 3D model of the city, with information on building efficiency, roof types, energy use, etc. The goal: “The model would allow energy planners to look at all aspects of energy consumption…
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A new start-up venture emerging from Urban Opus is demonstrating how social networking data can help communities become stronger, smarter and more innovative. The “wisdom of crowds” is like an urban myth: we want to believe, but tangible examples are hard to pin down. And don’t crowds often turn into mobs? Volatility and unpredictability make us wary of digital democracy. If collective humanity is to become a primary source of intelligence for smart cities we need to understand how to make ‘common sense’ not just absolutely reliable, but also quantifiably better than any other…
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Follow @rodgerlea I recently attended a presentation by Winn Nielsen, Head of City Data for Copenhagen. I was struck both by how far they had gone in laying the foundation for a smart, data driven city, and by how similar their approach to data was to the Urban Opus model. Some of the key messages from Winn’s presentation are: Complexity of issues and the need for technology suppliers to be partners not traditional suppliers. Winn stressed several times that the…
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