How Are The Governments Across the World Deploying Open Data For Smart Cities?
Open data has set a data-driven revolution across the world. It has the ability to capture every movement on the planet – whether it is a move made by a human or apparently by a non-living object – open data is estimated to generate 1.7 megabytes of new information every second by 2020. From 15,000 exabytes in 2016, the worldwide data now will surpass 40,000 exabytes at rocket speed. Well, a majority of the credit goes to the internet of things where a wide array of intelligent appliances, connected cars, sensors, surveillance cameras and other smart devices are always on the go with data transmission.
But what is the use of such a huge amount of data? Today investors are in constant search of companies who own a million miles of valuable data. It is because data has unlimited market potentials worth billions of dollars. The well-known company Tesla is the best example that advocates the fact. The company recently generated 1.3 billion miles-worth of driving data and to most of the people’s surprise it has surpassed the market capitalisation of BMW, the famous German luxury innovator – this news made the headlines in the financial market of 2017. Similarly, Uber owns driver and passenger trip data that worth over US $70 billion. So now you know why data is worth it.
We just spoke about the companies and their data here. But imagine how governments can make use of such data to improve our living conditions and eventually our planet through open data projects – it is just that we are going to discuss further!
Open data is the information that is made public. Making it publicly visible is an advantage because it makes things readily accessible by anyone anywhere with an increased level of transparency. Hence, utilising open data promotes efficiency and creates a pool of opportunities for the community and simultaneously offers innovative solutions to governments (because we are talking about only government) and to citizens as well. So from here, let’s begin our exploration of how governments are deploying open data projects to make cities more livable.
We have picked up some of the most interesting open data projects aiming at improving different urban challenges with uniqueness!
We start with New York as the city legislated its Open Data Law in 2012 to make all public information available to citizens on a single web portal by the end of 2018. This initiative gave birth to Bigg Apps that organises competition every year for all the New Yorkers to participate including entrepreneurs, innovators, people from academia and researchers. The objective is to help the city produce useful and resource-saving apps to enhance city operations and keep citizens informed. People together discuss on things like air quality, restaurant sanitation scores, building inspection scores so that all these information is readily available to everyone.
Check My Barangay project is the result of President Aquino’s commitment to eradicating corruption and poverty from the Philippines. The project aims at establishing multiple open data and smart city projects across rural and suburban areas. This project, in particular, is a concerted effort from local governments to improve the social standard of the smallest governing unit in the Philippines, Barangay. The project enables the citizens to keep track on budgeting and planning with increased substance helping to expand citizen participation and transparency.
Poverty in NYC map is an open data project rolled out by the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity as a resource that will help the government to focus and launch anti-poverty initiatives. The project involves input from the Poverty Research Team and American Community Survey (ACS) as additional variables.
The entire concept laid out by the local government aims at making the city more equitable. This open data project stands as a unique example of providing data-based solutions to address social inequality.
