Urban Big Data Centre: Open Data, 2014-2025

Promotes the use of smart data and innovative methods to improve social, economic & environmental well-being in cities. From 2014-26, it was also funded by ESRC to provide a national data service to enhance access to 'smart data'. UBDC focuses on 6 main research themes (labour market, housing and neighbourhoods, transport and mobility, urban governance, urban sustainability, and education) as well as two research methods (urban sensing and participatory analytics). You can find more information about UBDC by visiting https://www.ubdc.ac.uk. To explore UBDC’s data offerings, please visit https://data.ubdc.ac.uk/.  

The proposed UBDRC will bring together an internationally outstanding combination of researchers, data resources and engaged local and national stakeholders to establish a unique linked data resource based in the University of Glasgow (UoG). Through extensive partnerships with other key academic institutions, data-owning organizations, and other scientific, governmental, third sector and business organizations, the UBDRC will: (i) establish a world leading facility to create an multi-sectoral urban linked data resource from local government authorities and business owners in Glasgow; (ii) provide outstanding training and research support services to ensure wide exploitation of the data; and (iii) deliver a strategic approach to knowledge transfer and training to build capacity and engage with policy, business, and the wider public. The UBDRC will provide a unique facility for researching cross-cutting urban issues and complex urban challenges by enabling access to multi-sectoral linked data from local government, business and other sources. This vision will be achieved by: (1) Data Services: UBDRC will focus on bringing together myriad of datasets many of which are unique and hard to obtain, from multiple urban sectors to create a linked urban data resource that allows comprehensive and cross-sectoral research. The centre will provide data curation services and the necessary metadata and provide a range of data access services to users, including, where necessary, secure access to confidential data. (2) Methods and social science research: UBDRC will develop, test and evaluate a wide range of methodological approaches including urban and regional modeling, agent-based models, machine learning and other methods and will support research leading to new cross-cutting theoretical insights, hypotheses and understanding of urban systems, thereby stimulating foundational research on new models of urban behaviour, processes and service provision. The data resource will be used to develop spatially-indexed (and perhaps temporally-indexed) urban indicators on myriad aspects describing the quality and character of urban spaces, and the spatial distribution of the urban processes, eg, on environmental risks, mobility and accessibility patterns, housing and educational aspects, and other aspects that desribe the socio-demographic, economic, environmental, built environment, physical and other aspects of urban areas.. The data would further allow policy research on a wide range of urban sectors and the derivation of a multitude of approaches for urban governance and business development. Additionally, new insights may be derived for capacity-building, innovations and learning strategies to better equip citizens to meet a diversity of challenges in cities of the future. (3) Knowledge Exchange, Outreach and Public Engagement: The UBDRC will be an important node in a growing network of UK-wide and international initiatives on cities. The networks include: international centres on urban research and cities, international research Networks, and networks of governmental, private, non-profit and other organizations. The UBDRC will undertake a research programme to advance the state-of-the-art of methods related to the use of the data resource, as well as an applied urban research stream to demonstrate the use of the linked urban Big Data resource and to derive understanding towards theory, planning and policy. Research Group 1: Methods Research: A series of computational, data management, statistical, and urban analytics projects will be undertaken to make the data more easily accessible and usable. Group 2: Urban Research Projects (URPs): Research projects on substantive urban issues such as transport, housing, migration and education will demonstrate to data owners and policy makers the value of large-scale, cross-sectoral data linkage and lead to policy insights for public, private and non-profit decision-makers.