A common thread - cloud-based approaches
It is perhaps unsurprising to reflect that city priorities for the next 3-5 years all revolve around using cloud-based services to help cut through the ‘noise’ of legacy issues, and being able to take full advantage of innovation as it comes on stream.
Cloud-based approaches are evolving just like other areas of the data and tech-driven innovation revolution.
Core concepts include local data spaces - places where towns and cities (and other organisations) can store data for use by stakeholders, and where data integration occurs on a tactical basis - generally in a user-pays format.
Where to look for more tips and guidance:
Rapid pandemic data analysis |
This technique has been used to produce rapid data analysis as part of the COVID-19 pandemic. See, for example, this project from Leeds. https://lida.leeds.ac.uk/research-projects/local-data-spaces/ |
Data lakes
Tend to be spaces where an organisation or several can include data within the space or lake - and in a range of formats and states of completion/hygiene. This enables users to work with data at different stages and from a range of different sources. The lake acts in an agile methodology as an unstructured store - meaning that the data is not necessarily curated, but ensures that it can be used randomly in many different applications.
Where to look for more tips and guidance:
ODALA |
See the ODALA project to create a data lake for smart cities and communities in Europe. https://oascities.org/odala-developing-the-future-of-smart-cities-communities/ |
Where there’s a lake - there’s a lake house! Along with data lakes, providers are realising that the tools to collate and analyse data are also handy to understand data in various contexts (in essence, supporting its curation).
Open Data Portals
Open Data Portals provide generally curated data for public consumption. Many cities have established portals, and some cities have worked together to create regional portals. The advantage of portals offering data across more than one town or city is that when a stakeholder is looking for energy-related data for example, they can see data from a range of city contributors - thereby making benchmarking and other interoperability-related tasks far easier.
Where to look for more tips and guidance:
City of Kiel Open Data Portal: |
Istanbul - an example of a mega city's open data portal: |
Edge-to-cloud technology
Takes the concept of the cloud and creates the conditions for data to be at least temporarily stored, manipulated and even generated within a local device. This helps to reduce latency in operations and increase cyber-security. A number of applications now deploy edge-to-cloud technology for these purposes.
Urban / local data platforms
Urban/local data platforms and open innovation platforms are spaces that combine the benefits of open data portals with the analysis and insights capability of dashboards. Cities are increasingly attracted to the capacity to manage insights generation through platforms and systems offering a way for integrated data to be created and analysed. These can be on a city by city basis, for a region or for multiple cities.
We’ll be collating more detailed information on urban/local data platforms soon - watch this space.
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