open data

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 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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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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