Introducing Citydashboard.org: A Live View of City Data

Here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, we have just made live our latest in a series of services examining live data feeds - CityDashBoard. The system pulls in data from a variety feeds, developing our view that the next trend in OpenData is towards a live view of the city and live data feeds.

With the cities of Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh,  Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle included, it is London with the largets amount of live feeds at the moment. As Duncan Geere noted in the write up of CityDashboard in Wired -  the dashboard for the city pulls in TfL data, RSS feeds from BBC London news, geographical information from OpenStreetMap, weather data from Google, trends from Twitter, traffic cameras and water levels along the Thames. It also includes data from UCL's radiation detector.


Each section has a countdown to the next update with the weather from the Davis Vantage Pro 2 on the roof of CASA updating every 2 seconds, radiation every 5 seconds etc...


Based on a concept developed by Oliver O'Brien, Andrew Hudson-Smith and Richard Milton, here in CASA, the design and planning was developed by Duncan Smith and Oliver O'Brien with website development ultimately led by Oliver. Take a look at Olivers site for development details.

You can visit CityDashboard live at http://www.citydashboard.org/


The project is an output of NeISS, which is funded by JISC.

New York City 2259

Procedural with their impressive cityengine is certainly a company to watch, we have had a chance to use their demo and the ability to import GIS layers, combined with the rapid creation of cities is certainly impressive. As such their work on New York City 2259 is well worth a look.

NYC 2259 by is the extrapolation of New York city 250 years into the future, inspired by the great 1998 motion picture The Fifth Element.

Today's street network of NY, imported from openstreetmap.org, has been extended to a bigger area, available due to the lower water levels in the future.
The example includes grammar rules to create futuristic skyscrapers in two levels of detail as well as flying cars - press play below:



Take a look at the NYC 2259 page for full details...

CloudMade - The Isle of Man Mapped

Proving that you don't need huge resources, trucks or high end hardware the guys from CloudMade - Steve Coast and Nick Black along with long time OpenStreetMap contributor, Andy Robinson have been mapping the Isle of Man.

Using a GPS, three bikes and a car all of the roads, rivers, train-tracks and airports as well as a huge number of the car parks,restaurants, schools and other amenities of the Isle of Man have been mapped in little under a week.

Best of all the map is being made available via the OpenStreetMap project free of charge. The total cost of project was under £4000 although to be honest most of that is the cost of the laptops, a complete breakdown of equipment is below:

6 x GPS Units (£360)
3 x Digital Cameras (£450)
3 x Laptops (£2100)
10s x rechargeable batteries (£15)
100s x elastic bands (£2)

Its a different world compared to the large mapping companies, but if we wanted a map making we know who we would call - see http://www.cloudmade.com/ for full details.

You can take a sneak preview of the map before it makes its way onto OpenStreetMap.