Nokia HERE LivingCities

Have a nice day, Habr!

We are on the air again and this time we want to tell you about one interesting project Nokia HERE LivingCities , created by the joint efforts of the HERE location service team and our friends and partners from the CartoDB cloud mapping service, analytics and visualization.
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Many of us are accustomed to the fact that a city is often compared to a living being - a creature that owes man its birth, but not obeying it, but, on the contrary, subordinating. A creation that has its own character, soul, heart and, most importantly, a complex system of "veins and arteries": streets, roads, highways, junctions and rings, which allow any city to live and breathe. We decided to find out what actually represents the life of the city and processed a lot of different data in five metropolitan areas: London, Chicago, Rome, Helsinki and Mumbai. Thanks to CartoDB, we applied all the received information to a special virtual map in the format of daily timelapse.




The data that formed the basis of the project are constantly collected by our HERE platform using the devices connected to it - users' smartphones (of course, anonymously) and our supplying partners, which we have already described in more detail . Visualization is created using CartoDB cloud infrastructure using HTML5 to animate geolocation data for specific periods.

The Living Cities project has shown that the numbers can tell a lot of interesting stories, even about the city that you seemed to know everything about. For example, it turned out that Mumbai sleeps only 2 (!) Hours a day - between one and three nights.



The second place after Mumbai in terms of cumulative activity of its population is London, although in this case, most likely, there is nothing unusual: the city lives in the rhythm of the cultural and business capital and therefore wakes up around 5 in the morning. Rome starts doing business a little later, at 7.30 am, which only confirms some stereotypes about the capital of Italy.

One would expect that only in such a relatively small city like Helsinki, the night comes on schedule, but our experiment shows that Chicago activity also begins to decline rather early.

There are many other interesting data. For example, we learned that the average speed in London is 24.7 kilometers per hour, and Rome is a real gourmet paradise - there are about 2,100 restaurants here.



But what does this data give us? Looking at the "life" of these cities, their residents will be able to determine the best time to leave home for work, and tourists can see the areas in which nightlife is buzzing. Organizations can also use this information. For example, in order to choose a place for business or optimize working time.



Well, for us, this is a good way to improve our services and try to understand collective behavior. It is reasonable to assume that this is only a small part of how this information can be used. But as Renault Marioni from the HERE team says: “We are in the initial stage of considering what we can do with this kind of data. And our project is a beautiful canvas for finding various applications. ”