Urban Opus Datahub

A Data Brokerage for the Future of Cities

Urban Opus plans to provide a federated data hub that provides data storage and federates existing data sources to provide a single on-line presence and point of access for Urban Opus projects and partner data sets.  It will support for both real time and static data, support and visualizations, city data analysis with urban informatics, and easy to use application programming interface (API) and app framework for rapid application development.

Hub

KEYWORDS:  data hub, open data, citizen data, federated data, brokerage, visualization, analytics
AUDIENCE:   Urban Opus application developers and partner organizations
PARTNER/HOST:   Core platform and service hosted by Urban Opus
PARTICIPANTS:  Governments, NGOs, corporations, utilities, organizations, citizens groups
PROJECT LEAD: TBD (currently Mike Blackstock, Urban Opus)
PROJECT STATUS:  Development & implementation underway

Urban Opus Rationale

Innovation is best supported by a ‘platform’ which raises the success potential for all participants.  The datahub is Urban Opus’s platform and is core to its “trusted broker” business and operating model.

Description

The Urban Opus Datahub is a data storage and federation platform to support Urban Opus projects and initiatives with support for storage of meta data, search and linking to both static and real time data.  The aim of the hub is to provide a single on-line presence and point of access for the variety of data that will be produced and consumed by Urban Opus projects and partners.  Data will be contributed and consumed by both infrastructure providers, businesses, schools, government and health systems, as well as citizens themselves using Urban Opus applications or accessing the portal directly.

Partners will be able to both upload and download data sets using the portal or provide the platform with real time data updates and access via an easy to use application programming interface (API).

Key features of the UO Datahub will include:

  • Data Portal to manage meta data and links to static documents and databases. Based on CKAN, the world’s leading open-source data portal platform (used by Canadian and UK govt).

  • Real Time Sensor platform to manage and aggregate real time data from city infrastructure, virtual sensors from data published from the web, and social network feeds.

  • A unified API for data upload, search, and queries.

  • Landing site for hosting data related content, blogs, documentation, links to other components and an application directory.

  • Basic visualization facilities and ability to export data for advanced analysis and visualization.

Activation Path

The datahub is loosely based on some of the BigClouT technologies and will be augmented by a distributed ledger or blockchain technologies to mange identity.

References

About Urban Opus

Urban Opus is Canada’s first ‘smart city’ industry cluster. The new consortium serves as trusted broker for innovative projects and organizations seeking to employ data to enhance the urban experience.  In great cities of the world, the consummate wellbeing of people and communities is being inspired by data.  Join us to make that happen!

Contact:  David Vogt, Executive Director, Urban Opus – david.vogt@urbanopus.net

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