Looking at a city from different perspectives
Municipalities and city governments usually have different departments for public services, such as water management, traffic, education, health, urban planning and so on. Each department typically has its own tools and data sources. This is fine for most daily operations, but becomes inefficient whenever someone from department X wants to know something trivial that only people in department Y can tell. Obtaining such data then usually ends up in endless phone calls, e-mails and sending spreadsheets back and forth. After being used, datasets become forgotten and outdated, meaning that if a study or analysis is to be repeated, the whole process starts all over again.
Enter StellaSpark Nexus, an online digital twin platform that connects to existing data sources within municipalities such as public space management systems (GBI), cadastral information, open data portals, land use zoning plans and citizen frontoffice data sources. Nexus centralizes this information for everyone in the organization, making it available through a single web location, and organizes it into useful themes. With Nexus as data hub, knowing your facts is always just a click away.
Nexus is the beating heart of a smart city
Municipalities are rapidly discovering the benefits of citizen participation for management of public space. Citizen portals allow residents to report broken street lights, overflowing garbage bins, vandalism and mark unsafe areas in a city. The challenge is to make this rich source of information available to the right people within the organization, so that action can be taken. Once connected, Nexus automatically synchronizes any new incoming citizen reports and organizes them into the relevant themes (e.g. public safety, infrastructure, noise pollution, and so on). Employees within a municipality can subscribe to the themes that they bear responsibility for. Policy makers can use Nexus to quickly review neighborhood indicators in order to evaluate strategic improvement programs and investments, as well as to understand ongoing issues in the community.
Nexus also facilitates stakeholder participation by providing always up-to-date overviews of infrastructure and neighbourhood statistics. Finally, Nexus can also serve as an open data portal for citizens.
Urban analytics
With all data available from a single hub, it becomes easy to run data-driven models and feed them with always up-to-date data. The plugin-structure of Nexus allows for custom prediction models to be connected.