Networking & Wireless

CENIC Network Adds City of Los Angeles

• By Leila Meyer
• 05/16/16

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, in an effort to provide 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.