LBS

Location Matters in Manchester CityVerve Project

July saw the official launch of CityVerve, the UK’s demonstrator project in Manchester for large scale deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Ordnance Survey (OS) are part of a consortium of over 20 public and private sector organisations, ranging from SMEs to large global corporates, who over the next two years will design and deliver a series of citizen-focused solutions around the themes of Transport, Energy, Health and Culture, using IoT sensor and collaborative platform technology.

The first three months of the project will focus on the more detailed requirements of the use cases in each theme. This will help understand the type of existing content each use case needs access to, and the gaps need to be filled. For example, it is likely that it will be needed to provide accurate location and attribution data for street-side furniture, such as streetlamps and bus stops; and infrastructure to support use cases around way-finding and cycling/road safety. This could require ground-based capture, extraction of features from vehicle-based surveying, using remote-sensed aerial imagery to identify features, or collaborating with third party data suppliers and owners to validate and integrate that content with OS data. There will also need to be internal and consortium conversations about how that content will be delivered – the project will use the IoT protocol HyperCat as a data brokerage service – so more traditional data delivery methods will be a thing of the past. HyperCat acts as a data hub that organises data in a simple way that applications can search autonomously without human intervention. www.os.uk

BMW has 2 new partners for driverless cars

BMW is set to announce an alliance to develop self-driving cars with collision detection specialist Mobileye and computer chipmaker Intel. The tie-up is likely to focus on technology being developed by Mobileye to give computerdriven vehicles better reflexes without driver input, ushering in an era of selfdriving cars early in the next decade, analysts said. http://fortune.com