We received some fantastic news last week when Liverpool City Council and Smart Liverpool confirmed they would deploy our smart city solution after GeoSpock was granted a prestigious Mayor Challenge accolade at the Smart Cities Realised event.
Through a formal partnership, GeoSpock will now work with the city authority and its partners for a minimum of six months, with the possibility of rolling out the project on a “full-scale” basis after the pilot period.
Smart city solution
In our submission, we were able to demonstrate to a panel of experts how GeoSpock is uniquely positioned to maximise value derived from spatial data and will work across a number of areas to enhance Liverpool’s Smart City status.
Liverpool’s smart city “challenges” were split by the authority and Smart Liverpool into five areas, with companies invited to propose solutions in the areas of smart transport, smart environment, smart health, the ageing population and smart social skills.
We underlined how GeoSpock can provide direct solutions to the Smart Transport and Smart Environment challenges, while potentially also providing an agnostic data platform that will underpin and support other companies’ proposals.
Smart Transport
In terms of responding to the Smart Transport challenge, we delved into how to tackle the conundrum of improving the mobility of citizens while simultaneously reducing a city’s carbon footprint and environmental pollution.
We explained why this is such a challenge for so many cities – because the data associated with CO2 emissions and citizen mobility are held in disparate systems, making it impossible to correlate the datasets and identify relationships.
However, our solution will consolidate the data into one indexing and analytics platform, which will enable the city authority to take a holistic view and drive change at a macro level.
To drive deeper insights, GeoSpock will also enable Smart Liverpool to augment public data with contextually relevant private data.
We will help to increase the quality of the analysis by providing a single aggregated view of disparate datasets, bringing together historic city data. This will establish a platform that is ready for all new data types that may be incrementally added, allowing for a huge amount of historical information to be analysed at low cost whilst preparing for future data growth.
Smart Environment
With the Smart Environment Challenge, we explained in our submission how cities that embrace digital transformation – and, in particular, mine their data – will start to deliver practical benefits to its citizens.
For example, through location analytics, city authorities can implement geo-fences and restrict cars at certain times of day in order to lower CO2 emissions – or perhaps even grant licences to taxi operators if their cars are electric or have low CO2 emissions. We also explained how new approaches could include “nudging consumer behaviour in a digital city” by highlighting the benefits of avoiding travel at peak hours.
With the green light for implementation from the judges, we will utilise GeoSpock’s illumin8 visualisation software, which will be made available to Smart Liverpool, as well as the infin8 indexing data engine, which is able to include as much historical data as Smart Liverpool is able to provide.
The data will be created, hosted and managed on Amazon Web Services and, having ingested, anonymised, indexed and visualised Smart Liverpool’s data, we will customise parts of the visualisation front-end to deliver insights, whilst providing further support as and when required.
We believe that we can help Smart Liverpool to establish the Smart City project as a data lead initiative – a real benchmark for the city – that will ultimately open up significant opportunities beyond the scope of the project.
The team behind the challenges describe the initiative as “a great opportunity to get insights from a leading municipal authority whilst also potentially deploying solutions in the real world”, and we are relishing the opportunity to help the city to enhance the lives of its citizens, businesses and visitors, hopefully for many years to come.
The panel of judges comprised global and local experts, including Deputy Mayor of Liverpool Ann O’Byrne, Dr Jonathan Reichental, Cllr James Noakes, Professor Paul Morrissey and Carl Piva.
Here's the 15-minute presentation in full:
To find out more about how GeoSpock can help to drive your Smart City agenda, contact us.