Los Angeles Joins CENIC Network
The City of Los Angeles has joined the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), a 100 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) research and education
network, providing California schools, colleges and universities with
high-speed access to the city's data and services.
Los Angeles publishes more than 1,000 datasets on two open data portals. Los Angeles Open Data includes hundreds of datasets about the city's economy, public safety,
environment, city services, city budget, events and culture, parks and
libraries and transportation. Los Angeles GeoHub provides access to location-based open data related to business, area
boundaries, health, infrastructure, recreation, safety, schools,
transportation and other datasets. The GeoHub platform also lets
researchers explore, visualize, analyze and combine data layers using
maps.
While Los Angeles Open Data and GeoHub are available to
the general public, California educational institutions and researchers
will now have 1,000 times faster access to those resources,
facilitating their ability to share and analyze data, and exchange best
practices and new applications, according to a news release.
"This
peering partnership between CENIC and the City of Los Angeles
represents a unique opportunity to pair the sophisticated research and
analysis being done at California's great universities with the massive
data being generated in one of our country's most progressive Smart
Cities, Los Angeles," said William Clebsch, associate vice president
for IT Services at Stanford University, and chair of the CENIC Board of
Directors, in a prepared statement. "This will lead to advances in
urban living that have not been possible before."
Some of the California institutions that can use CENIC for high-speed access the city's digital resources include Los Angeles Unified School District, Caltech, UCLA, University of Southern California, California State University, LA and the Los Angeles Community Colleges.
CENIC plans to connect additional cities' open data initiatives to CENIC's research community in the future.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].