One Stop Destination to Know More About the Cities you Care About! This app uses Open 311 and CitySDK APIs to present information about cities, their events and the type of services they provide.

1. City Concierge V1.0
One Stop Destination to Know More About the Cities you Care About !!
(Powered by Open 311 and CitySDK APIs)
Final Round Presentation - 10th June 2014
© Srikanth Tamilselvam, Biplav Srivastava, Madhavan Pallan, Mitesh Vasa
App Instances
1. http://bit.ly/Ukn1j9 (That is:
http://54.200.19.247:8080/CityChallenge/participate.html )
2. http://citychallenge.ng.bluemix.net/participate.html

2. AIM: Serving People by Design
• Target users
– Citizens wanting to know more about their city
– Travellers planning to visit new cities with memorable experiences
– People (e.g., business, government) wanting to compare cities
• Group information along a small set of easy-to-follow categories
– We selected - Traffic, health, building, city image, others
– Easy to change to any set of categories
• Languages supported – English, Portuguese, Spanish, German
– Easy to extend to any

3. Serving People by Design
• Target users: Citizens, Travellers, People
Citizens, Travellers
Most events – Helsinki
Most open service requests - Lisbon

4. Check Services of Your
Favorite City – Chicago,
in example
Lisbon (in Portuguese)
Bonn(in German)
People, Travellers
Most city services – Lisbon; Traffic most common category in cities

5. Design Principles
• Focus on features that promote usage of city data
– Overcoming language barriers
– Overcoming API and data diversity barriers
– Highlight commonalities, promote comparison
• Follow standards (Open 311, CitySDK APIs)
• Overcome (City API) errors to stay useful
• Be resource efficient to promote mobile apps
– Standardize on output formats

6. Contacts
Name: City Concierge
App Creator:
Srikanth G Tamilselvam, Biplav Srivastava,
Madhavan Pallan, Mitesh H Vasa
Email address: sbiplav@in.ibm.com
Phone number: +91 11 4129 2100, +91 9810404142
Details Follow

7. Sales Pitch – City Concierge
In our application, we allow a person to know more about cities he lives in or wants to visit, provided the cities support
Open 311/ CitySDK data and API services. The user can use the information to compare cities based on events that
are happening, the services they support and the service requests they may have pending so that he can decide which
city he wants to visit and have a pleasant experience. Key points are:
• Different cities may provide city service information in 10s to 100s of service types. The user, on the other hand,
would understand only a few generic categories. So, the application clusters the information about services (and
their definitions) along 5 high-level categories of health, traffic, building, city image and others that are easy to
follow and use for comparing cities.
• Not all cities provide their information in English. The application can handle service information in English,
Portuguese, Spanish and German, and uses them for clustering. So, the user can look at the services more easily
even if they do not understand the service descriptions.
• The user can look at the events at the different cities in a time range and decide his plans.
• The user can look at the outstanding service requests at the different cities in a time range and decide his plans
based on likely experience he may have.
• The application can be used to rank cities based on how vibrant they are and how resident-friendly they are using
data from the respective cities.
The service type information works for any city in the world supporting Open 311. So, apart from the cities in the
competition, we have tested with Bonn, Germany (German language) and US cities of Tucson, Chicago and Boston. In
principle, there is no limit for the cities that the backend can support due to the data standards.
Major issue we faced: A few cities in the competition do not support Open 311 fully. That is, they support querying for
service list but not on service definitions based on service code. This should be fixed. E.g., Lamia, Rome. To maintain
application quality, we have to restrict the cities we could support in the front-end.

8. Cluster Services of Given Cities’ Services
Along “Basic 5”
• Focus on the right side module (Find distribution of city categories)
• By default, we have result clusters for 3 cities, 2 of them part of
current city SDK end points
– 3rd from Europe
– One can add any Open 311 supporting city to check
• Select any city to find their services in various categories
• Hover over them to find further information.
• Note this might take some considerable time so please be patient

9. Find Events for a City
• Module to help users to find events in cities for a duration with
awareness of the local issues
• Select one more cities and specify the duration and select search
• A table with city, number of events, total number of issues, number
of specific issues like health, traffic is displayed.
• User can sort based on preference
• User can drill on events and service requests and decide on theor
travel plans.

10. Many Enhancements are Easy
Showing events and open services on a
map is easy but has performance
implications. Hence omitted in first release.