Technology Strategy Board Destination Local Projects

The following is a list of Technology Strategy Board funded projects supported through the Destination Local programme.

Addiply: A Public API
Addiply: An Open API is designed to enable future third parties in this hyper-local advertising space to build new tools and revenue opportunities off our existing and fast-developing technology - as well as empowering us to share our experiences and knowledge of this particular market-place after six, long years at the local media coalface. We also feel strongly that working collaboratively in this regard and spreading best practice as widely and as quickly as possible in this convergent landscape, we can maintain the head-start we currently enjoy on our contemporaries in the US who, in general, still remain wedded to the notion that the answer to local media will come from the 'top down' as opposed to the new tools of enpowerment that work from the 'bottom up'.

TrulyLocal
The TrulyLocal project enables media organisations and online service providers to deliver relevant local news and content to users based on their precise location. TrulyLocal will mean an end to users being recommended irrelevant stories from many miles away  or stale content that is no longer newsworthy. TrulyLocal will also allow service providers to filter blog posts and social media based on the unique location of any unique user. From here on, local means local.

Termscape: Convergence in Hyperlocal Media through Coordinated Semantic Tagging
This project will study the feasibility of a novel coordinated semantic tagging approach called Termscape to support digital convergence across hyperlocal media within the City of York. Termscape is based on a decade of R&D and enables individuals, communities and organisations to add rich contextual tags or to their content (news articles, blog posts, multimedia, tweets, datasets, etc). The use of semantic classification allows communities to curate content across diverse platforms and media in a federated, emergent and value-directed manner. One output will be a generic technology validation of Termscape and an initial 'YorkMesh' that will provide seamless and integrative tagging across all forms of hyperlocal content in the City of York.

The Travel Time Platform - making local content more relevant
iGeolise has built the Travel Time Platform; it 'turns distance into time' and is live across GB. There is great value in the difference between distance and time - for example, by licencing Travel Time to a community business directory, their users can search for (say) chemists within 'a 15 minute walk' (or drive, cycle, bus, etc.) rather than 'within X miles' as now. Travel Time typically doubles the number of relevant results displayed; it works on any web enabled device (PC, smartphone, tablet etc).

This project adds two fundamentally valuable elements to the Platform; searching by 'time of day' and 'click to see the fastest route' to any selected content. It requires integrating all public transport timetables and road traffic flow information, but the core Platform was been built with this development in mind. The benefits that will accrue for the UK are economic, social and environment. Travel Time is a unique search facility, developed in the UK, and with global potential.

Hyperlocal media with FollowThePlace
Hyperlocal media with Followtheplace, is a feasibility study supported by the TSB which will research and evaluate new innovative hyper-local services based on multimedia and active tags. Residents, tourists, local businesses and public institutions can all benefit from the new way of engaging on the fly in dynamic targeted discussions.

YouCanPlan- a hyper-local mobile web -platform for local community planning consultation      
This proposal sets to test the technical and commercial feasibility of a hyper-local mobile service for consultation on local planning projects, including consultations on developer-led projects, local authority-led housing and regeneration, and community-led neighbourhood planning exploiting the opportunities presented by the new Localism Bill. The project builds on knowledge acquired from an earlier feasibility project led by Slider Studio and supported by Stickyworld Ltd in 2011 which scoped out the opportunity for such a service, and validated by feedback from local community leaders, professional consultants and local authority planners.  This project now re-examines this in the context of a hyper-local mobile-first approach, developing and testing a new prototype with support of three local communities and exploring a viable business model from consultations on high value developments in city centres.

Emergent Mobile Technology as the Catalyst for Business Collaboration and Partnership in Business and Industrial Parks
To conduct research into the feasibility of a mobile based technology platform that allows businesses based on industrial and business parks in the UK to collaborate in order to reduce costs, create business opportunities, retain and fully utilise staff between companies, and identify potential partnerships between businesses that have a mutual benefit.

Designing a hyperlocal transport news platform
Transport news, performance and feedback is one of the most important forms of hypermedia content as it is crucial to the lived experience of a neighbourhood. This project is focused on the design of a platform and API to turn transport information into news, to thread it together with social media feedback and to fund this platform through hyperlocal advertising on smartphones. To create this kind of transport hyperlocal content requires new tools to flag up operating anomalies, monitor service standard achievements, measure sentiment toward operators and to aggregate this content at both stop/station/road level and at neighbourhood level. The local advertising platform will be targetted at local businesses who can direct referrals from hyperlocal transport news and who would be willing to place advertising in the content. In this way the project will stimulate hyperlocal transport news streams, can leverage them to create new apps/services, and can monetise them.

Collaborative remote production processes for location based smart media creation and distribution by Hyper Local Social Housing Groups and their clients.
The project will test the feasibility of innovative, remote, production processes to enable both Social Landlords and Tennants to create quality, compelling, media to distribute public service information effectively. Mobile location-based applications for content capture and distribution will be integrated to allow testing of workflow processes, and the creation and delivery of 'my local media, where I am'.

Next Generation Local Information
Our project proposes a new model of connected local information systems, providing a significant improvement over existing provision, while opening up civic and commercial opportunities by:

• connecting good, relevant data into local and hyperlocal media
• informing and improving public discussion
• tracking issues of interest (as revealed by data searches and use) to inform priority-setting in local public services.

SPOKE - The Speeches and Statements Knowledge Engine

SPOKE is a project designed to give public and private sector organisations a 21st century tool for authoring, storing and sharing key data on written and spoken statements by individuals.

From the Levenson Inquiry, to loca council meetings, to family court cases and company AGMs, there is a widespread need to store transcripts of the words spoken by individuals at key moments. Current technologies do not allow any of the searching or re-use expected by modern users, and authoring interfaces are not optimised for recording the words of individuals. SPOKE is a commercially-focussed technology project with multi-market appeal, aimed at corporate and public sector clients who need transcripts, and who need them more cheaply and more re-usably than ever before.  This project seeks, through research, to define the market and feature set for SPOKE