Big Urban Data, Geospatial Computing, and My 2 Cents in an Open Data Economy
Much of our scientific and technological focus has been to ensure a sustainable future with healthy people living on a healthy planet where energy, environment, and mobility interests are simultaneously optimized. Ability to observe and measure through instrumentation of our environment and infrastructures from buildings to planet scale, coupled with explosion of data from citizen sensors brings much promise for capturing the social/behavioral dimension and provides a unique opportunity to manage and increase efficiencies of existing built environments as well as design a more sustainable future. Moreover, with increasing temporal resolution of geographic data, there is a compelling motivation to couple the powerful modeling and analytical capability of a GIS to perform spatial-temporal analysis and visualization on dynamic data streams. However, the challenge in processing large volumes of high-resolution earth observation and simulation data by traditional GIS has been compounded by the drive towards real-time applications and decision support. This presentation will explore the intriguing developments in the world of Big Data, geospatial computing, and plausible ways citizens can all become part of the open data economy for advancing science and society.