Colouring Britain Platform

How many buildings are there in a Britain? What are their characteristics? Where are different types of building located? How well do they work for users/local communities? And how efficient, sustainable and resilient are they?

Colouring Britain with website at https://colouringbritain.org/ is a research-led, free public resource, providing open spatial data on Britain's buildings. It is also an open knowledge initiative, built collectively by, and for, academia, communities, government, industry and the third sector. Any information you can add to our open platform is greatly appreciated.

Colouring Britain forms part of the Colouring Cities Research Programme (CCRP), managed by The Alan Turing Institute, which allows international academic institutions to co-work on a global network of interoperable open data platforms on national building stocks, and to accelerate sharing of resources and expertise. The CCRP's overall aim is to help improve the quality, efficiency, resilience and sustainability of buildings, and urban areas, and to accelerate the move to net zero in line with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. For further information please see http://colouringcities.org/.

Structure

This repository contain open-source code for the project which:

• stores building footprint polygons and source metadata
• allows site users to record building attribute data
• serves map tiles rendered from collected data
• allows site visitors to download the collected building attribute data

Building attribute data collected as part of the project will be made available for download under a liberal open data license (ODbL).

Project Board and Issues

To view all of the issue relating to Colouring Britain (and their current status) please visit the Colouring Britain Project.

Setup and run

Forking the Core Repository

If you are working with us as part of this GitHub organisation, then a repository and team may already have been set up for you. If you are already using the repository and want to add a new project, perhaps because you are expanding to additional cities, then please following these instructions to create a Fork of the core repository: working-with-colouring-core.

Customise the Application:

You can customise the Colouring Cities application by changing the values in the following file:

app/src/cc-config.json

For more information on the config system, see configuring-colouring-cities.

Test the application:

You can try out the Colouring Cities application by setting up your own development environment, which includes the option to load test data from OpenStreetMaps (OSM). See setup-dev-environment.

Last updated March 2022

Create a production version of the application:

We also have documentation on setting up a production environment here: setup-production-environment.

Last updated December 2021

Note: There are additional useful documentation in the CCRP Technical Manual.

Troubleshooting

If you are having problems with the application, first look here: troubleshooting to see if there is a solution for your problem. (Also, please consider updating this document if you encounter and problems and manage to solve them!)

Acknowledgements

Colouring London was set up at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London in 2016 as part of EPSRC funded doctoral research undertaken by Polly Hudson. Tom Russell was responsible for original technical design and open licence strategy and selection. Ordnance Survey and the Greater London Authority provided access to high quality building footprints, essential for platform operation. In 2020 the Colouring Cities Research Programme (CCRP) was set up at The Alan Turing Institute, which has since funded CCRP development. Exceptional technical contributions to the prototype have been made by Mateusz Konieczny, Maciej Ziakowski, Ed Chalstrey, Dominic Humphrey and Dr Mike Simpson, and to CCRP international programme development by Dr Falli Palaiologou, Will Taylor, Dr Alden Conner, and research colleagues managing platforms in Australia, Bahrain, Lebanon, Greece, Germany, Colombia, Sweden and Indonesia. Many other individuals and organisations have also contributed to the research programme and are thanked on individual CCRP platforms.

License

Colouring London/Colouring Cities
Copyright (C) 2018-2022 Tom Russell and Colouring Cities contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Contributors

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

polly64 🎨 🤔 🖋 🔍	Tom Russell 🎨 🤔 💻 📖	mz8i 💻 🤔	dominic 🤔 🖋	Adam Dennett 🤔	Duncan Smith 🤔	martin-dj 💻
MeldaS 💻	Tarn Hamilton 🎨	Louis Jobst 🎨	Ed Chalstrey 💻 📖	Mateusz Konieczny 💻 📖	Mike Simpson 💻 📖

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!

Even more thanks go to Colouring Cities contributors, funders, project partners, consultees, advisers, supporters and friends - everyone involved in the project.