Smart Emission project

Smart Emission project is a research project executed by a consortium of Dutch knowledge institutes, government, (ICT- and sensor) companies together with citizens in the city of Nijmegen. The goal of this project is to monitor, visualize and communicate a real-time, fine grained “environmental footprint” of the city. For that reason, a set of outdoor sensors and a related Open Geo Data infrastructure were developed. Also, a participatory process is organised to collaborate with citizens and professionals.

The researchers aim to answer the following research questions:

• Do low-cost sensors add to the fine-grained picture of air quality indicators?
• Does inclusion of citizens and professionals work?
• Does this open up opportunities for environmentally informed city governance?
• (How) do roles of government and citizens change?

More than 30 sensors have been installed at the houses and gardens of citizens, and pilot-version portals for viewing data have been developed. The data streams are being calibrated and analyzed by citizens and professional analysts. Several “Smart Emission citizen participants” meetings have been held and several use cases have already been completed. While citizens and experts now have 24/7 data of their local environment in their own hands, the sensor network is still being improved and extended with more sensors.

Smart Emission Project won the prize of the “Smartest Project 2016” in the Netherlands. The future vision of the project is to combine bottom-up and top-down communication and governance for the purpose of increasing urban health.

Smart Emission is one of the over 600 use cases published on the European Data Portal. If you are aware of another inspiring use case, share your experience and knowledge on different applications and websites using open data with the EDP via mail, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.