Smart cities need smart citizens

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Geospatial Technology conference looks at its potential in natural disaster

This week’s International Conference on Geo-information for Disaster Management is being held in Enschede in the Netherlands. Organisers will ask participants to find steady ground in a new workshop activity aimed at pooling skills and ideas about using data and sensor technologies to respond to natural disasters.

Operational CIOs from around the world will work with emergency services field operatives to trial a realtime response to an earthquake scenario, having to make use of whatever technology and data the group can get their hands on from the exercise field at Twente Military Airport base.

Best practices in harnessing military information, field transport, and urban and police systems will be developed on the fly and documented for the geographical information and disaster management workforce.

geospatial technologyThe exercise will conclude the conference proceedings which will focus on latest techniques in:

  • Data modelling and visualisation
  • Sensor and communication networks
  • User requirements and best practices.

Keynote speakers include:

Ed Parsons: Geospatial Technologist of Google,
Mark Neerincx: Extensive experience in fundamental and applied research on human-computer interaction for defense, security and health.

Keep up with conference proceedings and presentations at http://www.gi4dm.net/2012/

Our Facebook poll is still open...
Don’t forget to answer our facebook poll on what resources you want from citizense to participate in crisis mapping

iCity Project presentation

The iCity project, funded in part by the European Commission, has announced a call for enterprises, citizen groups, and innovators to participate in designing services using an open data ecosystem. This model of smart cities empowerment aims to generate new public service projects by facilitating access to municipal data, digital assets and city infrastructure.

 

The project – with a total cost of €5.21m – will operate until the end of 2014, and is a collaboration amongst the cities of Barcelona, Bologna, Genova and London.

 

 

iCity Project Special Interest Group

A Special Interest Group currently being set up will allow developers early access to iCity project resources. It will encourage the creation of public service solutions using the iCity platform:

Developers can register online at http://www.icityproject.com/#, but be warned the autocomplete form can be unwieldy as finegrain location data left our computer freezing for several seconds when trying to input our details!

 

62 entities have already joined the group, including apps developers, city authorities and institutions, research labs, and media consultancies.

 

A presentation overview of the planned infrastructure has been developed by the project team to demonstrate how the platform works:

iCity Project presentation

 

You can follow the iCity Project twitter stream or keep up with our Facebook page to receive news updates on this and other smart cities world initiatives.

 

Citizense has registered to be a part of the iCity Project and we look forward to providing reports on our involvement regularly at this site. Let us know on our Facebook page if you would like to be part of Citizense’s iCity Project volunteer team.