Using wiki in Urgenche Jouni Tuomisto, THL

There is help for wikis and Opasnet People are not complaining enough! –Most wiki problems can be easily solved. –But if we don’t know about them, we cannot help. Extensive help for wiki and Opasnet: –Marjo and Jouni in Urgenche –Juha Villman and Einari Happonen (IT personnel) –Avary group in Facebook for simple questions and work-to-be-done. Group of students and other young people who are ready to do data collection and data management tasks in Opasnet.

Why should I use Opasnet? Opasnet (and the password-protected area Heande) are not just wikis. They are full-featured workspaces. The main idea is to make any scientific research or policy assessment possible within one workspace. Why? Because, ultimately, we want to share our knowledge with other people – and learn from them. The easiest way to do this is to share as you work. Other cities and researchers can hear about us, learn what we do and join. Is there another way of sharing easily? –Many current habits may make work easier but sharing more difficult or even impossible later on.

Functionalities of Opasnet Wiki for writing the results, but also –Making plans about the work. –Discussing the plans, the work, and the results. –Wiki is the interface to other functionalities. A database and file storage for data and other files. –Simple data entries can be written on a wiki page. –They can be directly downloaded to a model. A modelling environment (based on open source statistical software R with thousands of add-ons).

Using R in Opasnet Why to use R? –We must have a lingua franca: researchers must be able to understand each other on the detailed code level. –Open source: we can freely use all available R libraries (soRvi, rbugs, RJAGS, xtable, ggplot2) –It is a rather common platform for complex modelling. –We could install also other open source platforms (Octave/Matlab) but so far it has not been worth it. Modelling code can be written on a wiki page and run from there on a cloud server. Code can be borrowed from another page  a simple way of sharing and standardising work.

WP2 Energy balance modelling Jouni Tuomisto, THL Kuopio

Main points 1.What did I share today? –Sharing information as soon as we get it and learning from each other is crucial in this project. 2.What does the city know about our assessment? –Communication with cities and policy-makers is crucial. 3.Models must be online and simple for a) the user and b) the developer. 4.We need mockups that work now. We’ll improve them on the way. Comments needed! 5.We have continuous online help in Facebook: Avary group Upload everything to Heande immediately

Energy balance model Based on the idea that energy production (+ conversion) and energy use are always in balance. Data for the model is given in four data tables: –Current energy balance: which activities produce and use the different fuels? –Flows: what are the unit input and output flows of energy, raw materials and pollutants in typical energy processes? –Policies: how do specified policies change these balances or flows? –Cost curves: which flows change and how much when balances change?

Energy balance example

Energy balance in Kuopio

Energy transformations

Climate change policies in Kuopio

A possible user interface

How to go from simple to complex? The models need specific columns from the input tables: –Energy balances: Activity, fuel, amount –Flows: Flow, activity, fuel, unit, amount… The input tables may have additional columns (determinants): Year, City, Age group, Sub-area,… If these additional columns are given, the data is merged with other data using these determinants. The calculations (code) are the same, but the number of rows calculated increases in detailed models.  Very flexible approach. The determinants can vary, and we don’t need to know or decide them beforehand. Example of using detailed data:

How to calculate impacts of city structure changes? Different functional city levels will predict transport modes,