SmartCity

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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2nd International Workshop on Smart Cities: People, Technology and Data – Call for papers

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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Smart City Standards – an overview

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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The No. 1 citizen engagement strategy for Smart Cities – Bribery?

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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Canadian Smart City Mission to Europe

One of our partner companies, Sense Tecnic Systems Inc, was recently invited to participate in a Canadian trade mission to Europe representing Canada’s Smart City technology companies. The trade mission, involving 15 Canadian companies first visited the UK for a 1 day smart city workshop. This was well attended by UK companies and innovation groups including: Future Cities Catapult: UK’s innovation hub for Smart Cities: video link, seek to 15 minutes in Bristol is Open: Smart City platform and projects from…

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First International Workshop on Smart Cities: People, Technologies and Data

Panel Session Summary by @rodgerlea Panelists Levent Gurgen. CEA-LETI France. Naonori Ueda. NTT Communication Science Labs, Japan. Daniel Gooch. Open University, UK. Salvatore Longo. NEC Europe Ltd. Germany. Masahiro Mochizuki. Ritsumeikan University, Japan. Rodger Lea. University of British Columbia, Canada. (Moderator) Background As part of the 1 day Smart Cities workshop held at the 2015 UbiComp conference in Osaka, Japan, a panel session was organized to discuss some of the key issues that had been raised in the workshop papers (See:…

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Smart City Datahubs – an innovation ecosystem enabler

Follow @rodgerlea One of the most significant issues facing Smart Cities is how to use OpenData and City Data, especially citizen contributed data, to facilitate new innovative city services. Pushing Opendata to city websites has certainly opened up data for access, but it’s still the case that most Open Data is hard to use – partly because of data formats and partly because of the lack of consistent access. These issues become even worse when you want to add in data…

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