Amsterdam, Barcelona and San Francisco sign up to new data platform

Three cities have signed an agreement to collaborate on establishing a common platform for using and sharing their data both within, as well as between, cities and their citizens via simple, mobile applications.

Signed today during Barcelona’s Smart City Expo World Congress by Amsterdam, Barcelona and San Francisco, the platform, Cityzenith 5D SMART City, aims to collect, collate and better use the big data that cities are already collecting.

“5D SMART City is the first and only cloud-based SaaS [software as a service] platform that consolidates multi-source civic data in a single point of view leveraging the unique interface of a rich, object-enabled 3D model of a city,” Michael Jansen, CEO and founder of Cityzenith told Cities Today. “The compelling, life-like 3D visualisation interface makes real-time city data available to all stakeholders, government, commercial, and citizen, in a way that they can easily understand.”

Developed by one of the principal creators of Google Earth, the platform will also enable users to create their own apps to solve urban challenges, and then share those smart apps with all global partner cities through the 5D SMART App Market. Through the use of the SMART Apps, city leaders will be able to streamline operations and borrow best practices from partners around the world, while citizens have the opportunity to improve the public places where they live, work and play.

Speaking from Barcelona’s Smart City Expo, Melanie Nutter, Director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, said that the platform will help her city achieve its goals for greenhouse gas emission reduction.

“Data is also essential to catalyzing development of neighbourhood scale greening through Ecodistricts, where the public and private sectors set and meet common goals,” she added. “Engaging with our counterparts in cities around the world–through the Cityzenith platform and development of mobile applications–is an opportunity to pool resources and best practices, as we harness data in service to sustainability and accessibility to the public.”

Cityzenith’s Jansen added that the platform will be made available to cities at “a very affordable price” and additionally each city will have the option to earn shared revenues from the licensing of approved data through the platform to both commercial and government data consumers.

When asked about privacy concerns, Jansen said that each city’s participating agencies would decide which data will be made available.  “Cities remain the gatekeepers of their own data, and control access rights. We estimate that 25 percent of the cities’ data will not be shared with the public,” he said. “The platform and SMART Apps are designed to respect all applicable data privacy and data obfuscation policies.”

Cityzenith are in discussions with cities in Europe, the US, the Middle East and Asia to join the Global Partner City programme.