City Observatory, providing large data for 55 cities worldwide

Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED conference, http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/18782.html "> officially released the City observatory at ESRI Global User Conference ( Hints Observatory) project. The world's 55 largest cities share the city's data, which will be the first truly public observatory on the planet.

This project is funded by Richard Saul Wurman and Geographic information Systems Technology provider ESRI (environmental BAE Research Cato, Inc.) Jointly initiated, through the provision of world-wide visual data, synchronized contrast to show the impact of the world's cities, including traffic, population, road speed, open space, the young population, the elderly population.

At present, users can experience on the site, in February 2015, the entity interactive version is expected to be open to the public at the Smithsonian Institution, users will be through a multiple-screen interaction to achieve data comparison and control.

The project uses techniques such as 3D modeling, geographic information systems, and terrestrial satellites to build a global visual model. The concept of a city observatory is actually an attempt by Wurman to model clay more than 40 years ago. Although each city has a map, the different cities use the legend and scale standards are not uniform, which makes the data comparison between different cities become particularly difficult.

The City Observatory uses digital technology to create a universal language system for the city. The project has taken the authoritative resource crowdsourcing model, with more than 15,000 map scientists from more than 200 countries providing data, and the ArcGIS online platform based on ESRI will present an increasing number of variables on the interactive map.

For example, people living in Orlando, United States, have a hard time understanding what the 3.9-square-kilometer concept of Shanghai Disneyland is, and the comparison becomes intuitive by hints Oberservatory, where users can put Shanghai Disneyland with Universal Studios.

This project will be more than just an online museum of a city map, and as more cities and more variables join, it will become a constantly updated global urban information base, where urban planners can draw on solutions to the same problem in different cities, where marketers can learn about radiation from the site. The ordinary inhabitants of every city can learn more about the environment in which they live.

According to World Health Watch forecasts, by 2050, 7 out of every 10 people live in cities. The huge population movements that occur in China's urban and rural areas each year are not just Chinese characteristics, but the transformation of large urban data into urban understanding is perhaps far from enough if only technical analysis is available.