opendata

Benchmarking the CKAN Datastore API

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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A Poster for Smart City Public Engagement

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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Smart City Copenhagen: key lessons from the Head of City Data, Winn Nielsen

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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Smart Cities: technology challenges

 As part of our recent hackathon, a series of questions were asked to the local organizers of the cities involved in the Global Urban Datafest. The questions and answers give some useful insight into the main issues we are trying to address and my thoughts on how we at Urban Opus can tackle those issues. —- As a faculty member at the University of British Columbia and President and CEO of Internet of Things platform company Sense Tecnic, you spend…

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