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A1. FAQs
We believe highly visual open data platforms that make data on the composition, operation and dynamics of all buildings, at building level, free and accessible to all is essential to support research and practice able to improve global stock quality and to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals. We also believe that the most efficient way to collect relevant data and analyse patterns, in order to solve complex urban problems, is though reproducible open source platforms - designed and operated by stakeholders from multiple geographic regions, sectors and discipline, including citizens themselves - which facilitate data collection, collation, visualisation and sharing, and test feedback loops between a range of data capture methods.
The concept for Colouring London - i.e. for open mapping platforms sharing comprehensive data on the composition, quality and history of the stock at building level, to improve stock, and local area quality, efficiency and sustainability, was first explored in the 1990s at the Building Exploratory charity in London. The Exploratory was built over 6 years by and for local communities -working with stakeholders from government, academia and industry and the third sector- as a model for low-cost knoweldge sharing centres, and housed a permanent interactive exhibition combining knowledge and resources from science and technology, the humanities and the arts. This included testing a new type of public GIS interface (though at this time restricted to use via government intranet) layering multiple spatial datasets on the past and present of the stock, at building level, and including aerial imagery allowing people to zoom onto their homes
Between 2014 and 2016 researchers at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London began to merge work on integrated GIS platforms on the stock undertaken at the Building Exploratory with advances made by the open data movement in open data platform initiatives, online crowdsourcing and open source code respoitory development. The result was the Colouring London prototype which went live in 2018. In 2020 the project moved to the Alan Turing Instititute - the UK's National Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence - where the Colouring Cities Research Programme was set up to support reproduction and testing of the open model in other countries.
The Colouring Cities Research Programme (CCRP) has been set up a to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and data about buildings at national and international level. The aim of the research programme is to increase stock quality, sustainability, efficiency and resilience, to support the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, and to assist communities and other stakeholders in this process. The CCRP also looks to effect a step-change in the amount and type of building level attribute data available for use in scientific research specifically, and in the application of AI and machine learning, to advance understanding of the stock as a complex dynamic system. It does this by bringing together international academic institutions, able to harness and collate the knowledge and data held by stakeholders at country level, to co-work on reproducible open-source code for open data platforms able to tackle common problems of data fragmentation, incompleteness, quality, formatting, range, geographic coverage, granularity, security and accessibility. The CCRP also promotes The Turing Way which looks to advance reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science. See also:https://github.com/colouring-cities/manual/wiki/A.-What-is-the-CCRP%3F
The Colouring Cities Research Programme (CCRP), for which Colouring London is the prototype, currently works with academic partners across nine countries: Australia, Bahrain, Britain, Colombia, Greece, Germany, Lebanon, Indonesia and Sweden. More information on these and partner prototocols can be found here. https://github.com/colouring-cities/manual/wiki/B.-CCRP-INTERNATIONAL-RESEARCH-PARTNERS-;-links,-resources,-protocols-&-meeting-dates. Within each country academic leads then collaborate with multiple stakeholders. See also https://github.com/colouring-cities/manual/wiki/C.-CCRP-partner-NATIONAL-COLLABORATORS-&-CONSULTEES
Colouring London's inital development was mainly funded by the UK's Egineering and Physical Rnesearch Coucil (EPSRC), Historic England and Innovate UK.
International development of the CCRP and work on the prototype since 2020 has been funded by The Alan Turing Institute and by the UK government's AI for Science and Government funding programme (ASG).
International Colouring Cities platforms set by academic partners are funded at national level. Further details of this funding can be found in section M of the open manual i.e. https://github.com/colouring-cities/manual/wiki/M1.-COLOURING-AUSTRALIA. It will be collated in future.
Retention of high quality research software engineers is one of the biggest problems. We are now looking at a model where engineering expertise is eventually pooled across countries. The need for a long initial period of funded research time to develop and test the first stage of the prototype- where impact measurement was problematic- was a challenge to achieve. We needed, as in the Exploratory, to build, incrementally, and to create deep, extensive and trusted foundations and networks to create platforms from which rapid, multidisciplinary and geographically extensive knowledge sharing, and data analysis could then occur. Also finding a way of expanding the CCRP incrementaally in a way that was affordable and beneficial to all partners.
We still feel we are in the experimental phase in London even after over 7 years! Our current focus is on testing of integrated data capture methods. What is brilliant is that our international partners such as Dresden are testing and advancing research in many new areas. We will begin to publicise Colouring London and to set up Colouring Britain next year. Individual users have however begun to test the site and the potential for large-scale citizen input has been made clear with a single user entering over 40,000 building age entries - data which when randomly checked were found to be of exceptional quality.
The interface is specifically designed for citizens as well as professional stakeholders. The use of colour is essential to this process and physical process of colouring in. When a user clicks a building and adds data colour is used to thank them and to help them see how each data entry they add is a critical piece in the visual puzzle. Colour needs to appear instantaneously for this to work properly to retain user interest. It is also used to show that we can work collectively, whoever we are, on a single canvas to provide information necessary help solve complex urban issues. We expect to learn much from Colouring Dresden work next year, funded by IOER's recent prize, in terms of blockers/facilitators to citizen participation that will be fed back into the core open code design.
We continue to work to look at ways of improving data quality . the main ways are as follows: Visible edit history details - as open street map Verfication buttons Source links Uncertainty measures- e.g. earliest or latest possible data Feedback loops between data generated using computational processes, acessed from official datasets, and checked at building level by experts in the crowd. We will also have icons showing how data are generated in future
Everyone has knowledge of how well buildings operate - we all live and work in buildings, and how to improve their quality- even if they think they don't, whether a resident, a building professionall who designs, builds and manages buildings, or an academic or government policy makers. Online open data platform that facilitate knowledge sharing using visualisation at building and city scale have been found to be a highly efficient, low cost way of capturing information necessary to improve quality and support long-term sustainability and resilience of our stocks , and of building interest across stakeholders and citizens in engaging in this process. We have also found that countries we work with are all intersted in collecting similar main types of data.
We are currently working with our international partners to set CCRP hubs that support Colouring Cities open data platform, in a number of global regions. We are starting co-working on academic papers across countries and beginning to co-work on improving core-platform code. Once a sufficiently large global database has been developed we will also be using AI and machine learning approaches to gain insights into data patterns.
The project is now being implemented in other countries. How far does The Alan Turing Institute support rollout?
It is important to stress that members of the CCRP international research group are also each building stock experts and as such each also bring specific research expertise to the table. The aim is to ensure a perceived equal balance of benefits for CCRP partners compared to benefits they give to the CCRP programme as a whole.
CCRP resources provided to CCRP academic partners Use of the Colouring Cities Research Programme logo; Inclusion on the Alan Turing Institute website; Free use of the Colouring Cities domain name; Dedicated partner page on the Colouring Cities Open Manual with editing rights; Access to online CCRP PI and engineering meetings managed by The Alan Turing Institute (see meeting programme below); Software engineering guidance for research software engineering teams for demo platform development; Help-in-kind support for funding applications which relate to CCRP platform setup; Opportunities to co-work on platform code and share engineering expertise; Opportunities to co-work on content and interface design and share research and stakeholder expertise; Opportunities to co-work on additional platform tools as well as animations and simulations of data and 3D/4D open models; Opportunities to co-work work on data analysis across countries and to experiment with AI and machine learning approaches; Opportunities to co-work on research papers; Opportunities for joint publicity; Opportunities to co-work on international funding bids.
Users are actively discouraged from providing the CCRP with personal data. Users are not required to add personal information to use the site. The site is free to view. For those wishing to edit only a username and password are required. The email address is optional. If provided this allows us to send the user an email to reset their password if they forget it, and in exceptional circumstances contact a user directly if it looks like they are misusing the site, for example to let them know if we plan to disable or remove their account.
The email address is stored in a database which can only be accessed from within the local network of the Colouring London application server, which is only accessible to select developers working on the project. Users of the Colouring London site can only access their own information (there is no "admin panel" or other kind of user with special access) and connect to the site using standard HTTPS encrypted communications. Documentation of crypt and gen_salt used can be found here.
It would actually be useful for us to know more about the sector users come from etc so we can ensure in the long run we maximise accessibility for diverse groups but we think security is more important and so for the moment we will continue consult directly with representatives from as many stakeholder groups as possible instead. We also don’t collect data on the inside of homes as we think this is personal space and needs much more discussion.
The green verify button can only be clicked once per user. The idea is to add as many features as possible to the Colouring Cities interface that enable us and users to gain as accurate a picture of data reliability as we can. At the moment this button simply logs if another user agrees with this edit. We still have work to do on this. For example what happens if the entry has multiple verifications but is then edited? Though All verifications will be recorded in the edit history the viewer will still only see the new edit with no verifications instead of say a previous entry with 10 verifications which is likely to be more reliable. This is an example of one of the hundreds of issues we try to grapple with that don’t have easy answers and why working across countries and academic teams and getting feedback from multiple sectors is so important.
High quality engineering time will be a significant expensive of any data platform unless methods of sharing expertise can be found - as demonstrated by collaborative maintenance initiatives such as OpenStreetMap. However many of the wonderful engineers we have worked with who have been very interested in open data and academic research don’t have money as a major motivator. Furthermore, though they will of course be interested in the project they will also have many people wanting to work with them and are likely also to want to advance their own initiatives/ideas. Research software engineers are ideal for Colouring Cities as these engineers come from academia and so the research aspect is already a priority for them. Their work is also already coordinated by academic departments, so we recommend our CCRP partners collaborating with such teams wherever possible. The more our open code is tested and the more countries/academic departments come on board the more a diverse groups of great engineers will become involved. The idea is that though most of CCRP work will involve engineers developing high quality databases for their own countries, some time will be able to be given by each to co-work on Colouring Cities core open code. If there are 20 countries in the pool that is potentially a lot of engineering time, and PI time, available to improve core code features that then benefits/ speeds up work for everyone. Furthermore if one team in a country has questions or issues others can help answer these. This is already happening and the Software Sustainability Institute funded our technical architecture advisor Tom Russell to coordinate engineering discussions with CCRP international engineers last year. Worth noting that Colouring Bogota is testing a fantastic model driven by engineering students.
The four approaches above plus feedback loops between then are what I meant by integrated. The feedback loops also improve data accuracy and speed of data capture. So you can use automated methods to create a draft of age data – we’re doing this at present for London using vectorised historical street data, and then ask expert historians and building conservation groups to use the map as a canvas to collectively verify these one by one.
How many people have entered data since the start / launch of Colouring London? Are you happy with how many people have participated so far?
Getting you these now. We actually are only now starting a big push on crowdsourcing. The reason it has taken so long is that we have had a very small team for many years and there have simply been so many features we have needed to build to make the platform make sense that is has not felt ready to publicise until now. We still have several hundred outstanding issues on Github and are also constantly wanting to add new ideas which is exciting but can be frustrating if things have been designed and we know are useful but we just can’t get them out to users because of lack of engineering time. Hence why the engineering pool is so important but this has taken many years to begin to set up. We went live in 2018, officially launched in 2019 and it is only in 2023 that I think we will really begin to see numbers rise significantly. Our initial main push for 2023 is with the historic environment community as this is the sector best set up to voluntarily provide high quality data relevant to multiple categories
You have said that London is still in the experimental phase, even after seven years. Why is that? And is it a "bad thing"?
No it’s a good thing! These projects need to be developed incrementally. The first iteration of Colouring London (using mapping interfaces to integrate and visualise data on the composition and history of building stocks at building level) in the late 1990s at The Building Exploratory charitable trust in London (which was also built collaboratively and took over six years to set up the basic structure). It wasn’t until 2015/16 through working with Ordnance Survey in the UK and with Tom Russell at UCL/Oxford that were able to get comprehensive high quality building footprints for London, up online (essential building block of Colouring Cities platforms which act as visual mini filing cabinets for all our data) and begin to connect the concept of open databases/mapping platforms combining info on the composition, performance and history/dynamics on stocks to many advances made in the meantime by the open data movement. So you have to be patient with these things. Also though you have to have reliable ongoing funding it is much better in my view to have less funding but for this to be committed for 3-5 years enabling you time to collaborate across sectors to lever in help in kind of a much higher value (in a way that benefits all sides) than get the funding in a lump sum that has to be used quickly and that grows teams much too fast and which then runs out. Negotiation and development of trust and collaboration with so many stakeholders also takes a lot of time.
The CCRP is currently managed by Turing – in 2022 under a UK Artificial Intelligence for Science and Government (ASG) grant and in 2023 under core funding. We are now beginning to help set up hubs for global regions which operate using the turing model and simply provide informal support for academic departments within these regions wishing to reproduce CCRP open code. Each country finds its own funding, ideally starting with small amounts available with academic departments able to use platforms to answer research questions relevant to them. We are interested in agile working and developing supportive flexible networks but not creating new bodies/admin unnecessarily and wasting money. We think that we can run our global hubs at minimal cost with those academic institutions/countries supporting these initially offering some help in kind but we will need to apply for international research grants to support this process, and allowing it to be mainly self managing but also overseen in case of issues, and to maximise research outputs and impact from it.
Is the Colouring Cities Research Programme (CCRP) there to support the Colouring London project or how can you describe the relationship between those two? Does it back up the project with scientific research?
The CCRP has evolved out of the development of Colouring London. Colouring London has to date operated as the open code prototype for CCRP international partners. However from this year we are changing this model. Colouring London will now be renamed and expanded this year to become Colouring Britain. Core code from colouring London has now been copied into a new repository called core-colouring cities. Features and issues in this GitHub repository will now be co-worked on by engineers from all participating CCRP countries. Turing will continue to oversee code additions and changes.
Our engineers are already beginning to test use of AI in the development of our open code and this year we will begin to develop algorithms to support rapid large-scale inference specific types of data based on footprint size, shape and specific configuration. What we are really interested in in future working with academic partners to use AI to begin to identify underlying patterns and relationships within the data. But this can only happen once we have collected enough data/ huge amounts of data within and across countries for such patterns and cycles to be able to be identified. This is what CCRP platforms are set up, in this first stage, to do. We’re interested in for example better understanding the relationship between building form and construction and urban health, to look at deprivation cycles in urban areas over more than 100 years and identify whether areas of high deprivation largely remain (as they do in London) in the same areas despite a century of policies, to begin to understand why retrofit is occurring more rapidly in some geographic locations than others, and to see what are patterns that are common across countries or specific to a single nation? But we also need to do this in a way that always maximise security and privacy of international platform users and of building occupiers. So a lot more discussion is needed and a lot more work undertaken around ethical issues as we go.