Solutions Archive - Page 12 of 35 - 52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH

Citizen Science

Facilitating public engagement and collaborative efforts in scientific research to advance knowledge addressing real world challenges.

Installation and Support

Launching the KomMonitor platform for Stadt Münster

The Ministry of Labor, Health and Social Affairs of North Rhine-Westphalia funds the city of Münster within the framework of the social funding program “Zusammen im Quartier” to strategically expand its social and neighborhood planning. An important goal of this project is to establish a data platform for the integration and analysis of small-scale data in order to analyze neighborhoods from a sociodemographic, health and supply perspective in a coherent and citywide comparison.

The City of Münster decided to establish the KomMonitor platform as a basis for decision making in order to support interdepartmental planning processes and to control offers and measures for strengthening neighborhoods. To this end, 52°North supported the city of Münster in deploying the complete KomMonitor stack in the technical infrastructure of the citeq, a municipal IT service provider. In addition to setting up KomMonitor, 52°North conducted several training sessions to guide staff from different departments in data analysis tasks for the KomMonitor platform.

All installation, technical support and workshops were provided in 2024.

KomMonitor at Stadt Münster — Workshop with 15 departments of the City of Münster to co-develop an indicator catalog for KomMonitor

Customer

Stadt Münster, Germany

Global Filter and User Favorites

Enhancing the discovery of indicator datasets by introducing global topic filters and user favorites

The city of Essen has been an early adopter since KomMonitor was a research project. As a practical partner of the KomMonitor research project, Essen played a key role in designing KomMonitor to meet the needs of municipal users for a comprehensive monitoring tool. For many years now, Essen has relied on the web-based open source application KomMonitor as a technical solution for implementing small-scale social monitoring and continues to contribute to the soware as a co-developer.

In order to open KomMonitor to the public, the city of Essen wanted to further develop the filtering and selection of indicators. 52°North met these requirements by implementing a new global filter functionality and introducing user favorites. It is now possible to selectively group individual datasets or entire themes into global filters, which can be activated on demand or embedded as query parameters in URLs to load the KomMonitor Web Client with only a small set of datasets. In addition, user favorites allow users to create personalized collections of records for quick access to relevant information.

The enhanced filtering functionalities contribute to a more intuitive and low-threshold access to information in KomMonitor

24_KM_Essen — Global filter and user favorite

Customer

Stadt Essen, Germany

Atrai Bikes

Riding with the senseBox:bike in a Data-Driven Bicycle City

Transforming bike commuting by providing real-time data insights

The Atrai Bikes project aimed to support urban planning by involving citizens, businesses and local governments in the systematic collection and analysis of bicycle infrastructure data. The two-year project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the São Paulo Research Foundation, FAPESP in Brazil, is a joint effort of three organizations: re:edu and 52°North in Münster, Germany, and the Cordial Institute in São Paulo, Brazil.

A key component of the project’s objectives, the integration of hardware technology from the open source senseBox:bike project and a web-based analysis platform has been accomplished. The infrastructure (see Software below) provides insights into parameters such as distance to car traffic, vibration levels, temperature fluctuations and particulate matter concentrations. These insights are invaluable to various stakeholders and provide a comprehensive understanding of the urban cycling experience and enable Stakeholders to enrich discussions with city offcials.

The data collected is carefully stored and visualized using the openSenseMap solution, an open-data platform enhanced with a web-based analysis component with GeoAI tools. This technology not only enables cyclists to make informed decisions about their routes, but also allows businesses to optimize logistics and governments to improve cycling infrastructure and understand cycling flows.

A robust Citizen Science approach complements this technological innovation. Workshops held in both Münster and São Paulo engaged participants, deepened their connection to the project and strengthened their skills and motivation. This joint effort not only enriches the user experience, but also advances the sophistication of the software analyses, bringing significant advances to urban cycling environments. Despite its original scope, Atrai Bikes has expanded beyond its initial focus. New campaigns were initiated in Wiesbaden, Arnsberg and Greifswald.

In addition, our team developed the OpenSenseMapToolbox: a Python-written tool to download and store OpenSenseMap data for easy end-user implementation.