GeoForAll UrbanScience CityAnalytics

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Welcome to "Geo for All" Urban Science and City Analytics Thematic

Chairs: Chris Pettit (Australia) and Patrick Hogan (USA)

The mail list will be geoforall-urbanscience@lists.osgeo.org

With the "Geo for All" Urban Science and City Analytics thematic group established, the chairs of this are now the contact points for any new initiatives or ideas. All members can use the maillist (one it is working) for collaborating on building subject specific collaborations. This way we can make sure it is scalable and meets local/region requirements/needs. All ideas are welcome.

All participants should also support the Open Cities Guiding Principles detailed below. Thanks to Cameron Shorter for this.

Open Cities - Guiding Principles

  • All material created is made available for all under an Open License
  • All material is of sufficient quality that it can be built upon by others in the network
  • All participants aim to reuse, extend, invent material (in that order)

Note that it is more valuable to maintain one set of core material, than to have lots of competing material.

Who in our network is doing what related to this theme?

  • Jim Miller, University of Kansas, Computer Science
    • Using NASA World Wind for several open source geo-visualization efforts, including Lidar and multivariate scalar and vector field visualization.
    • http://people.eecs.ku.edu/~miller/
  • Ant Beck, University of Nottingham Research Fellow
    • Currently transitioning into CityAnalytics looking at city wide entropy based energy management simulations. Have aspirations for an open, big data environment.
    • https://www.linkedin.com/in/antbeck
  • Phillip Davis, GeoAcademy
    • The GeoAcademy is using QGIS 2.8 to provide Massively Open Online Courses through the Canvas Network to students around the globe for free. We currently enroll 4,000 students in our March 2015 cohort.
    • www.linkedin.com/pub/phillip-davis/9/59/b7b/en
  • Patrick Hogan, NASA World Wind Project Manager
    • Building open source virtual globe technology meant to stimulate innovative solutions managing geospatial data, whether open or proprietary.
    • https://www.linkedin.com/in/phogan
  • Giuseppe Conti
    • Trilogis Srl, Italy. Working on a project for indoor and outdoor interoperable services (www.i-locate.eu) involving different cities, hospitals, museums as "testbed"
    • https://www.linkedin.com/in/gconti
  • Evangelos Mitsakis
  • GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation, Arizona State University
    • Applications of free and open-source spatial analytics and decision support systems to urban modeling and scenario planning
    • https://geodacenter.asu.edu/ (but who do we contact?)

Urban Science / City Analytics: Key Application Areas, Needs and Challenges


We owe this 'first cut' for our CitySmart app to OGC Smart Cities Spatial Information Framework, http://gisuser.com/2015/02/ogc-smart-cities-spatial-information-framework-white-paper-announced/, and also to Brandt Melick, Information Technology Department Director, City of Springfield Oregon USA putting this CitySmart app idea to initial action, http://www.nsdinow.org

  • 'CitySmart' app categories' (feel free to expand):
  1. Education
  2. Emergency Services
  3. Environmental Protection
  4. Health and Medical
  5. Intelligent Buildings
  6. Intelligent Transportation
  7. Public Safety and Security
  8. Sanitation
  9. Urban Planning
  10. Utilities - Smart Grid, Smart Water, etc.
  11. Indoor positioning (added by aperezn)
  12. Context aware recommender systems (added by aperezn)


  • Data sharing – Municipalities need to be able to share information with site developers, site constraint specialists (environmental scientists, planners and engineers), utility service providers and regulators. The following information is requested on a regular basis for a wide variety of location based solutions, namely (ESRI products, Autodesk products and standard office products such as excel, access, etc.). These data sets most often include, in order of importance:
  1. Imagery (3-inch pixel is preferred, 1 foot pixel is less preferred, 1 meter is getting much less preferred)
  2. Cadastral Information (parcel polygons, Rights of Way (ROW), property ownership, assessment and taxation information and property class)
  3. Address Information (house number, street name, City, zip, site location (coordinates) and zoning information)
  4. Jurisdictional boundaries (incorporated areas, city limits, county boundaries, etc.), urban growth boundaries, public safety response areas
  5. Elevation Information (DEM’s (raster), DTM’s (vector), contours and spot elevation points, as well as mass points and break lines)
  6. Waterways and protected areas (wetlands, fish-bearing streams, endangered species habitat, well-head protection zones, etc.)
  7. Facilities a.k.a. utilities (waste-water, storm-water, transportation systems, power, drinking water, etc. who owns the facility, who maintains the facility, etc.)
  8. Structures a.k.a. facilities (bridges, building foot prints, complexes, monuments, etc.)
  9. Documents (reference material, procedures, regulations, metadata, etc.)
  10. Lidar everyone wants yet few understand how to put it to good use (we are spoiled with 8 points per meter, 4-2 points per meter is still of good value)
  • Biggest challenges - data simplification, data currency, projection (datum) conversion, unit conversion (metric to standard), storage, firewalls, metadata, etc.
  • Urban Planning and Site Review – Municipalities need to evaluate the impact of proposed development activity on the existing build and natural environment, which typically includes estimating how much cut and fill is being proposed, how proposed land alteration impacts surface drainage, how proposed structures will connect to city services (waste-water, storm-water, drinking-water, power, etc.), how steep the roads will be (slope for fire trucks), how close to wetlands and other protected waters of the state. These data sets most often include, in order of importance:
    • Imagery
    • Cadastral
    • Elevation
    • Facilities (structures and utilities)
    • Waterways . . .

Technologies in our network that are available for addressing these needs


Key research questions

Potential Study or Educational Service Learning sites:

  • Universities and university management are like small towns. Who in our list of universities are using GIS to manage their campuses?'
    • Massachusetts, USA
      • University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Schweik and Stepanov)
      • Town of Conway, MA (Schweik -- possibly a service learning case)

Potential Partners

  • GeoAcademy (Phil Davis)
  • IBM (Anybody have a contact to this SmartCity program?)

Links and References

  • Resilience: A Bridging Concept or a Dead End?
    • “Reframing” Resilience: Challenges for Planning Theory and Practice
    • Interacting Traps: Resilience Assessment of a Pasture Management System in Northern Afghanistan
    • Urban Resilience: What Does it Mean in Planning Practice?
    • Resilience as a Useful Concept for Climate Change Adaptation?
    • The Politics of Resilience for Planning: A Cautionary Note
    • http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649357.2012.677124
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