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As part of IBM’ s efforts to help build a smarter planet, City Forward is a web-based, multi-sensory hub of insight and information’” insight and information that can be used by cities and their citizens to see themselves in new and powerful ways. It will be a dynamic resource that leads users of all types to discover and explore areas of particular relevance to their goals and situations.
City Forward connects a community of experts, activists and interested parties’”each making unique contributions and drawing unique value from the initiative.
More than an information repository, it will enable users to interact with, add to and make new connections among data and discrete pieces of knowledge. It will be a dynamic resource that leads users of all types to discover and explore areas of particular relevance to their goals and situations.
By mapping the interconnectedness of systems often thought to be independent of one another, City Forward will help us to anticipate and optimize for unintended outcomes of actions taken within the city.
It will do so through the use of a unique, integrated suite of technologies:
- Power interactive exploration tools turn raw data into information’”revealing important patterns and insights.
- Easy-to-use collaboration tools enable globally distributed teams to explore information, change assumptions and share knowledge.
- Powerful authoring tools give subject-matter experts the ability to illustrate ideas and trends and to encourage discussion of their validity and impact.
- Intelligent, agent-based simulations provide realistic, bottom-up interactions capable of illustrating previously unforeseen implications.
- Reusable simulation definitions leverage a range of appropriate exploration options’”from interactive 2D graphs and soundscape explorations to immersive, multi-user 3D environments.
- A flexible simulation framework enables subject-matter experts to easily define and evaluate new simulation models.