At the AGI Geocommunity Conference Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith, Director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at The Bartlett, University College London, gave a fascinating introduction to the topic of smart cities and how the integration of BIM and geospatial is key to enabling smart cities.
The statistics are incredible. This really is the era of big data. Every day we create 2.5 quintillion (1018) bytes of data. According to IBM 90% of the data in the world today was created in the last two years. The data comes from sensors, social media sites, videos and digital images including those from from satellites, commercial transactions, cell phones, smart meters, weather and environmental monitoring equipment, and many ither intelligent electronic devices. Every person has become a mobile sensor, many GPS enabled. There is even a scale that will tweet your weight. Incredibly, every minute there are 100,000 tweets, Google handles 2,000,000 search requests and users share 684,478 pieces of content on Facebook. A lot of this data includes location either explicitly or via textual analysis.
Andrew talked about the rise of big data (a lot of it generated by cities) and the importance of linking Building Information Modelling (BIM) to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), citizen or crowd-sourced science and the internet of things. His main point is that the linkage of these four things is the key to the generation of the future smart city.
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