Smart City Atlanta: MapATL Citizen Alerting System

Company

The City of Atlanta

Atlanta is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is one of the South’s largest cities. Atlanta is known as a major business city. It is home to the Coca-Cola Company, CNN, AT&T, Home Depot, and many other Fortune 500 companies.

Location

Atlanta, GA

Industry

State & Local Government

Services

Azure Infrastructure & Applications

The infrastructure was developed using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and by building a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. Designed the Azure based applications for the City, working under the umbrella of the City’s “SmartATL” initiative.

Modern Web Development & Azure Migration

ASP.NET Core Web API was used to build a client-facing web app providing a rich user experience. IoT, hybrid cloud,and the Enteprise Data platform was migrated to Azure.

Challenge

Atlanta is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area and the ninth-largest metropolitan area in the United States.

Atmosera partnered with Microsoft Field Sales to migrate the City of Atlanta’s platforms to Azure. This involved demonstrating various cloud services and capabilities, including POC components for Azure PaaS, Cosmos DB, Xamarin, and the Bot Framework. The resulting chatbot, using QnA Maker and Azure Bot Service, provided interactive responses to common inquiries about the city and its services. This success led to the development of the first set of Azure-based applications for the City’s “SmartATL” initiative.

SmartATL is an ongoing initiative aimed at improving the livability of Atlanta and fostering economic growth by using IoT and Big Data analytics. In collaboration with Microsoft, the City of Atlanta showcased a public-facing data visualization application called MapATL. This application includes a user interface, supporting APIs, and a CosmosDB database, allowing users to query and view openly available city data on an interactive map and receive personalized notifications.

Solution

Building SmartATL Citizen App

The City of Atlanta sought a forward-thinking solution for its new platform, aiming to provide information to data scientists, researchers, and the citizens of Atlanta. The city provided the initial requirements, and the Atmosera team was chosen to refine those requirements and implement the solution.

The main goal was to enable users to access data relevant to them in specific areas of the city. Users would not only be able to browse data but also register to receive notifications to stay updated. The envisioned functionality involved a web application, an API, and a database. To ensure scalability to meet the city’s needs, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform was chosen for its flexibility, services, and scalability. MapATL 2.0 utilizes various Azure services.

Building the infrastructure involved designing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to create the necessary cloud resources, building a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline in Visual Studio Team Services, creating a data import tool, setting up web projects, and preparing other project needs. With this infrastructure in place, the focus shifted to implementing the prioritized feature list. Combining Azure services such as Azure Active Directory B2C and Cosmos DB (using the DocumentDB API) with Angular and ASP.NET Core Web API made it possible to complete the implementation quickly and resulted in a tight feedback loop for the City of Atlanta.

Outcome

Azure-based applications for the City, working under the umbrella of the City’s “SmartATL” initiative.

The City of Atlanta requested a set of features that they felt would bring the most value to their citizens. Atmosera provided guidance and helped to groom and prioritize features to deliver a minimum viable product in time for Atlanta’s SmartATL event. The final requirements focused on the functionality users would immediately utilize, and an intuitive user interface experience.

The solution was developed and implemented on a short timeline to meet the delivery requirements of the Experience SmartATL launch and to provide a foundation for continued development. The MapATL 2.0 project successfully combines many different technologies and services to build a single cohesive solution that delivers on the vision of the client and provides the flexibility needed for the future.

Atmosera a Microsoft partner was chosen for its expertise in developing and deploying Azure solutions, for being a recognized leader in software architecture, and for deep technical knowledge in Angular for modern web development.