About

Overview

Urban datasets come in many forms. Every municipality and organization uses different formats, standards, and file structures to represent their buildings and related data, such as energy consumption and space occupancy. Various components of the TOOLS4CITIES ecosystem consume urban datasets, both from closed and open sources, but that means each tool needs code to read, parse, and clean data for its own purposes, which may lead them to become incosistent, redundant, and hard to maintain.

To ensure quick, flexible, and consistent access to urban datasets, we developed CITYdata, a middleware that abstracts away these complexities and allows users to work with diverse urban data sources through a unified, extensible interface. Rather than reimplementing data handling logic across each tool, CITYdata provides a standardized approach to data integration through the following abstractions:

  • Producer: connects to data sources and fetches data.

  • Operation: describes transformations to be performed on producer outputs (data).

  • Runner: calls a series of producers, executes a series of operations on the producer’s outputs, and then outputs the resulting data.

CITY\ **data** detailed subsystem view

CITYdata exposes Producers and Operations through a REST API, making it easy to use as a standalone tool or integrate with existing tools. We are working towards making CITYdata a unified data access tool to serve the entire TOOLS4CITIES ecosystem. If you would like to know more about CITYdata architecture and the research work behind it, please check the Architecture and References pages.

Current state of the project

CITYdata is currently being developed by the Ptidej Team, under the supervision of Dr. Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc.