Over the past couple of months we have been hinting at a data platform that we have been building.
The day has come to introduce USMART and give you a peek at what’s under the hood. We won’t be unveiling the complete open data platform just yet but we are looking for beta testers to explore, play and contribute to the development of USMART, our exciting new data platform.
Technology and data are two key dimensions of smart cities and help empower smart communities. By unlocking data silos through integration we can enable data-driven decisions and generate new intelligence to improve services for everyone. The USMART data platform enables organisations to share, analyse and ultimately open up their data so that they can optimise and increase efficiency as they drive to do more with less.
What makes USMART the next generation open data platform?
Our team learnt a great deal from planning and procuring OPEN Glasgow’s Data platform. Unfortunately not every organisation has the luxury of £24M Innovate UK money to explore the potential of open data. Following on from that project we wanted to build something for everyone and enable others to build smart communities.
During the many hours of planning and developing USMART over the last two years, one of the co-founders of UrbanTide said, "Our platform will need to be super simple (to use), super secure (no hacks) and super cool (do something cool with data)." And that is what we set out to build.
USMART is in the first phase of development. Currently it is an open data portal with more intuitive flow and easy-to-use interface than any other existing open data portal. We are developing USMART with simplicity in mind - simple to use, to interact with, simple to upload, process, manage, discover and work with data whatever your knowledge of data.
During our work and discussions with our alpha testers, one of the main feature requests was a super simple tool and work flow that aids data owners in the process of making their data available. USMART right now has a set of productivity tools to handle the whole process of opening up datasets and virtually holds the hands of data owners and publishers, guiding them along the journey of becoming an open data organisation.
USMART is being built from the ground up. We’ve used the latest technologies and standards, exploring new architectures and tools to build our system. We are developing a resilient, secure, scalable platform, a system where you can start with a small amount of data, and USMART will grow and become smarter with you, all the way to consuming big datasets and managing real-time data.
Here's a real-time data story of USMART in action for bus arrival-time predictions in London.
USMART ~ Mobile first development
Our data processing pipeline processes and transforms your data providing new value and views of your data. USMART is able to consume, upload and publish any kind of data with version control built in to ensure your datasets remain neat and consistent throughout the whole process.
We are currently seeking beta testers to start plugging real-time data into USMART, which is the next step for our development process. We'll support your organisation to become smarter by exposing and analysing key datasets, providing insights and enabling you to mine, manage and crucially monetise your data.
We want to make system integration simpler and more user friendly. Early next year we will start working on integrating back office and other enterprise systems with our beta testers. We want to build a seamless data transfer and publishing experience and help unlock new value for further development.
“Really love the simplicity of the design and how USMART guides you through the data uploading process. And the auto generation of APIs is a fantastic feature.”
— early beta tester
USMART and smart communities
The key stakeholders of a good open data platform are the data owners and publishers and the data consumers, the wider public including developers and citizens and data scientists who would like to play and work with the published data. We are in the process of engaging with and building a community of developers and citizens who will consume data published within USMART, helping our partners create success stories around their published datasets. We are partnering with organisations to help us reach and engage the developer and citizen community - but more on this news a little later.
Do more with less
Our open data platform is more than a platform where you just park your open data. USMART supports both open and closed data in your organisation and ultimately helps you open up, manage and become smarter about the data you have.
We are looking for beta testers
If you would like to join the USMART community as a beta tester and try out USMART or you would simply like to stay up-to-date with news about the ongoing development of the USMART platform, please drop us your email and we will be in touch.
Only a few places left in our USMART beta tester programme!
Join today to unlock the value of your data.
