[Ica-osgeo-labs] Launch of OpenCitySmart - The Open Platform for Smart Cities

[Suchith Anand]

Colleagues,

Thanks to the excellent work and efforts of Chris Pettit and Patrick Hogan who lead the "Geo for All" Urban Science and City Analytics thematic [1], and with the release of 'CitySmart' What if? planning support system from AURIN [2][3] , we will use the European Space Agency's EO Science 2.0 conference [4] at ESRIN to launch and build collaborations for our "OpenCitySmart - The Open Platform for Smart Cities". The conference will present precursor activities in EO Open Science and Innovation and develop a Roadmap preparing for future ESA scientific exploitation activities.


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OpenCitySmart - The Open Platform for Smart Cities

Patrick Hogan , Brandt Melick, Maria Antonia Brovelli, Charles Schweik, Jim Miller, Sven Schade, Chris Pettit, Suchith Anand


The world is shrinking, actually we are getting larger in it, and the cities have to absorb today’s exponential increase in population. World population since the ‘second industrial’ revolution after 1850s has grown from 1 billion to almost 8 billion today. In 1950 at a mere 2.5 billion, we were almost evenly distributed between rural and urban. Today, in the developed world, approximately 80% of the population lives in cities.

This is creating very difficult conditions for sustainability, much more simply managing basic city services. We must learn to be more efficient along with being more effective. To most wisely achieve this goal, we need a more collective approach to problem-solving. Many, if not most of the challenges facing the cities of today are quite similar in nature, if not identical, from infrastructure management to essential public services. Why must each city solve these problems alone? If the cities of the world were to share solutions with each other, they could each focus on different parts of the problem and thereby only bear the burden for a small fraction of the load. And by working together we may come to better appreciate what we share in common as well as experience the joy being able to help each other.

We propose to establish a unifying, open virtual globe, OpenCitySmart, with an API for functionalities. Based on existing open solutions, we will seed this global platform with an initial suite of functionalities that include tools for managing a renewable power grid, wind and solar, based on the success stories of municipalities in northern Italy. We will include functionalities for managing input of LiDAR data and infrastructure . This will be in concert with municipalities around the
world, including, Springfield, Oregon USA, Como Italy and Melbourne Australia.

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Myself and Geo4All colleagues  look forward to see many of you at ESRIN for this. We will have an interactive demo ready by then to help build ideas for future research collaborations.

Best wishes,

Suchith


[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GeoForAll_UrbanScience_CityAnalytics
[2] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/ica-osgeo-labs/2015-July/001894.html
[3] http://aurin.org.au/projects/portal-and-infrastructure/what-if/
[4] http://www.eoscience20.org
[5] http://www.geoforall.org




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