Sustain

Urban Data at Your Fingertips

The Sustain project focuses on harnessing the data revolution in urban systems. In particular, the project reconciles the diversity (sources, encoding formats, storage frameworks, time scales, and spatial coverage), volumes, and velocities at which data are generated. A key goal of the Sustain effort is to harness the wealth of information available in this data by supporting a rich set of data exploration, discovery, visualization, and model validation operators. To this end the Sustain project facilitates data explorations, charting, modeling, and refinements at scale. More importantly, rather than work on a collection in isolation, Sustain allows researchers to select, query, and build models over features in diverse collections.

Why Sustain Matters

The United States is highly urbanized with more than 80% of the population residing in cities. Cities draw from and impact natural resources and ecosystems while utilizing vast, expensive infrastructures to meet economic, social, and environmental needs. The NSF has invested in several strategic research efforts in the area of urban sustainability, all of which generate, collect, and manage large volumes of spatiotemporal data.

Sustain substantively alleviates data induced inefficiencies in urban sustainability settings. Data may be encoded as shape files, point observations, gridded data, or sketches. Inefficient dispersion, load balancing, colocation, and indexing of data can induce prolonged completion times for basic explorations. Sustain includes several innovations that facilitate fast data explorations, effective visual analytics, and support for diverse modeling operations. The Sustain project includes support for a rich set of services that are aligned with the needs of the urban sustainability community. We engage with two of the three major urban sustainability networks in the United States: UWIN and UReX.

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