UrbanData2Decide

The capital of the United Kingdom hosted the intermediate project meeting which took place at the Open Data Institute headquarters.  The two-days meeting offered the possibility to discuss about the current status of the deliverables and to sketch out the focus of the second half of the project, that is evaluation and prototypical development.

Planning the 2^nd half of the project: From evaluation to development

One of the main achievements of the meeting was to shape a more detailed evaluation plan: Starting from the work plan described in the project proposal, and well-coordinated by the partner responsible for evaluation and validation (ZSI), the team elaborated a detailed strategy that in the next months will permit to evaluate different use cases and various visualizations in form of sketches, wireframes, click dummies, mockups, etc..

In general, the consortium agreed to cover emergencies as well as strategic issues. In detail, the Open Data Institute (ODI) will focus on the so called underground crowding indicator, whose aim is to support the London underground users who can see which the least crowded carriage is and get on it. The focus of SYNYO will be on the situational awareness, that is, the comprehension of what is happening e.g. in a certain city. To this aim solutions like a trend monitor (i.e. text based analysis of social media and online media such as newspapers, blogs), a visual monitor (images, videos), organisations streams (social streams), and open data maps will be investigated and some of them will be selected for the development. Finally, the University of Copenhagen (ITU) will pose its attention on images and in particular those coming from the social network Instagram. In this case, the idea is to aim at an Instagram map, providing not only an overview of the pictures posted e.g. in a certain geographical area and related to a given topic, but also to provide different kind of interactive capabilities to support the user is his/her exploration. At the same time ITU will also focus on the DecisionMaker, an instrument to support decision makers in their daily activities.

On the top this feedback, a limited set of prototypes will be accordingly developed, which will result in a proof of concept/demonstrator that is not too close to the market.

UrbanData2Decide holds the stage

At the end of September 2015, the coordinator Peter Leitner from SYNYO was invited at the JPI Urban Europe High profile event in Brussels to proudly present UD2D as representative example of project focusing on new urban research and innovation. Aim of the event was to gather actors and stakeholders from a wide audience (e.g. policy-makers, mayors, city administration, urban practitioners, urban experts and research, representatives from Member States, Brussels-based urban networks and European institutions) and discuss about past experiences, possible innovation and future research directions. Similarly, in November, the project was presented at the eChallenges conference in Vilnius, Lithuania. Aim of the venue was to provide an international forum on ICT related entrepreneurship and innovation, to bring together government, industry and research stakeholders, and give the participants the opportunity to share knowledge and experience with potential innovation and research partners.

Moreover, to ease the dissemination of the content of the project and to enlarge the possible audience, a short video in form of animated cartoons was produced. It is now available HERE.

Next Meeting

The consortium agreed to organize the next project meeting in Malmö, hosted by the Malmö University. The meeting will take place almost in spring, on 17-18 March 2016.