IBM launches smart-city portal for decision-makers
IBM has gone live with a free web resource called City Forward that’s designed to improve the quality of life in cities of all sizes around the world by helping officials make sounder and more scientific decisions on city services.
The site gives policymakers, citizen-advocates and the public a new perspective on how their respective cities are performing compared with others. It presents easy-to-use data to help them make more informed decisions that improve services and make their citizens and businesses healthier, happier, safer, more productive and prosperous.
City Forward captures vital statistics on the performance of specific services such as education, safety, health, transportation, land use, utilities, energy, environment, personal income, spending, population growth and employment. Users can gather, compare, analyse, visualise and discuss statistical trends, giving them real-world insight that can help shape public policy — before laws are amended or passed.
Official data on a city’s well being might be publicly available, but they are often scattered or exist in a hodgepodge of formats, making it hard to compare one city or service to another. Even within a single city, such information is often published independently by individual agencies, making it hard to see the bigger picture. City Forward addresses these issues by bringing useful statistics and graphing tools together in one place, offering easier and more insightful analysis.
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