Urban Resilience Geo Dataportal
The URGED project addressed an increasing global requirement for the provision of better predictive decision support tools for urban infrastructure managers to enable cities to become more resilient to environmental and social threats. Earth observation (EO) derived data products, analytics and monitoring tools can identify where there is a likely high risk of subsidence and flood risk via online, interactive maps, to improve infrastructure planning and management and reduce operational costs. This new opportunity has emerged through the escalating need for cities to become more resilient, and the availability of new satellite data sources such as Sentinel 1 and 2, combined with the evolution of Rezatec’s EO analytical capabilities, such as SAR interferometry. The project aimed to have a profound contribution to city-regional economic, environmental and human well-being by demonstrating the value of space data in enabling strategic investment and decision making to support more resilient development pathway. The URGED platform is a global service. For the Demo project, the pilot implementations were executed in the UK due to the location of the end users however the data products have global commercial potential. The URGED platform was built on top of existing system and service architecture but with new and crucial additional development to support the URGED services, such as geospatial data, flood hazard data, land surface movement hazard and so on. Predictive analytics toolkits and analytic services based on Earth observation data, automated image processing techniques and diverse geospatial analyses were employed to create analytical data for urban landscapes. The URGED Portal is a security-enabled web application that acts as a user friendly client to access data products and is the primary method of data delivery and enables users to search, view, interrogate and download geospatial datasets.