CityDashboard: Watch your city's data in real-time
As cities get smarter through technology, more and more data about cities will be available to the public, in real-time. But how we organize that data will be key to taking advantage of this increased awareness of our urban surroundings.
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London came up with one idea for organizing urban data: CityDashBoard. It's a live look into a wide range of live statistics. Information from the number of bikeshare bikes available to air quality levels to the city's mood can be checked at any given time. The site also pulls data from local transportation agencies, weather from Google, local news from RSS feeds, and trending topics in a city from Twitter.
Currently the service is only available in major cities in the UK: Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle, with the London page providing the most data.
It's a lot of data to take in all at once. And it's not immediately clear what the benefits would be other than getting a quick snapshot of a city's data at any given time. I would probably just look up the weather, for example, rather than going to a site with a range of data. Still, it's an interesting concept.
And as more cities make their data open to the public, developers will continue to find interesting ways to present that data in ways that make city living a little easier.
[h/t Digital Urban]
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com