Bringing urban data together

Manchester is home to a number of smart-city projects that are reshaping the way we live in our city. Triangulum is piloting smart energy and mobility solutions in three European cities (Manchester, Stavanger and Eindhoven), while CityVerve, backed by Innovate-UK, uses of the Internet of Things (IoT) to redefine how we use smart technologies in a living, working city. The common denominator of all these smart-city initiatives is data and data-enabled services, and the ambition is for Manchester-I to become a data portal that manages data at a city level as an active, ongoing process.

At the same time, both the University of Manchester and the city generate large quantities of urban data. Manchester-I is a single data hub that brings data from these different sources together. Manchester-I can be thought of as an open data platform that on the one hand collects data generated by, or relevant to, the city, and on the other hand provides access to such data in order to enable better informed decision making, assess the impact of specific policies and allow the community to create data-driven value.

Manchester-I also addresses issues commonly faced by end-users in terms of data accessibility and usability, and provides the community with a unified, comprehensive and user friendly way of accessing a wide corpus of data pertaining to the different aspects of urban liveability. It provides a legacy for the city that will continue after individual projects come to an end.

A resource for research and teaching

Manchester-I is designed to provide a resource for staff and students at the University of Manchester to support research and teaching relating to energy, environmental change, mobility, behaviour change, and urban sustainability amongst others. The data currently available relate to mobility/transportation within the Corridor, energy consumption of some of the University’s buildings, air quality and weather indicators, and water level measurements from across the river and canal system of Greater Manchester. Manchester-I can also host data that is being generated by research at the University of Manchester, exposing it to a wider audience of potential users. If you would like to host data on Manchester-I, please contact the hub coordinator, Ettore Murabito.

For more information and data, visit Manchester-I.com.