Yesterday at the INSPIRE conference, Federico Prandi gave a presentation about a fascinating open source project called i-SCOPE that involves developing 3D urban models that can be used to provide interactive smart services.

The concept is to develop 3D Urban Information Models (UIM) from accurate urban-scale geospatial information as a basis for smart web services based on geometric, semantic, morphological and structural information at urban scale level.  This information can be used by local governments improve decision-making on issues related to urban planning, promote inclusion among various users groups (e.g. elder or disabled citizens), involve citizens collecting geo-referenced information based on location based services.  i-SCOPE provides an open platform on which ‘smart city’ services can be developed.

The models are based on CityGML 2.0.  CityGML includes 3D geometry, topology, semantics, and appearance for urban environments. CityGML also supports a standard mechanism for adding extensions,
called Application Domain Extensions (ADEs).  There are several Application Domain Extensions (ADEs) that have been developed to extend CityGML to other domains.  For example,  I blogged about a basic extension UtilityNetworksADE that was proposed for city utility networks.

The I-SCOPE project has three very practical goals

• Improved inclusion and personal mobility of aging and disabled
  citizens through an accurate city-level
  personal routing service which accounts for detailed urban layout,
  features and barriers.
• Optimization of energy consumption through a
  service for accurate assessment of solar energy potential and energy
  loss at the building level.
• Environmental monitoring through a real-time
  environmental noise mapping service leveraging citizen’s involvement
  will who act as distributed sensors city-wide measuring noise levels
  through their mobile phones.

The concept is to develop ADEs to extend CityGML 2.0 for these three application areas.

Crowdsourcing

A very interesting and innovative aspect of the project is to use crowdsourcing to collect data for two of the application areas, mobility and noise mapping.  For example, for noise mapping the idea is to create real-time and aggregated noise maps through data collected by citizens who use of their mobile phones as noise sensors measuring city-wide noise levels.  In this way citizens are involved as prosumers (producers and consumers) of environmental data.

Some of the challenges of this approach that Federico discussed include estimating statistical significance, verifying the accuracy of citizen reported noise levels, and relating noise levels to specific features of the city model.