This page is focused on guiding the users in realizing their first Dashboard. At the end of this page, there are links to other examples that may be used for creating professional Dashboards.
Dashboards can visualize and monitor data from different sources: users’ personal devices, City public data (points of interest, defined as POI, real time data trends from public sensors, heatmaps etc.) and other data sources (available as personal KPI, personal POI etc). Dashboards are based on graphical widgets showing real-time trends and last values of devices, as well as maps showing position of devices, heatmaps computed on interpolated sensors data, several categories of points of interest etc.
As prerequisites, it is assumed that the user’s personal device(s) have already been properly registered (see the page “How to add a device to the Platform”), and the desired data source(s) have been properly added (see the page “ How to add data sources to the Platform”).
For this tutorial we have logged in the Snap4City portal registered to the Helsinki organization. The steps to create your Dashboard are listed in the following:
- Starting from one of the Dashboards list views (https://www.snap4city.org/dashboardSmartCity/management/dashboards.php ) in the Dashboard Manager, click on the orange button “New Dashboard” on the top-right, see (1a) in the figure below.
Figure 1. Public Dashboards list.
After clicking the “New Dashboard” button, the Dashboard Wizard tool opens, in order to guide the user with few simple steps to the creation of the dashboard and the instantiation of the desired widgets. We can choose to display a large variety of data, such as public data ingested and made publicly available for the user’s specific organization/City, as well user’s private data, coming from his/her personal devices, apps, personal KPI and POI etc.
As shown in the picture, the Dashboard Wizard is composed by three tabs. In the first tab, called “Dashboard Features”, the user is required to choose a template and insert a title for his/her dashboard. Pre-defined dashboard models available are:
- Selector and POI: a list of services with a map showing the position of listed services;
- Selector, POI, trend: a list of services with a map showing the position of the services listed. It is possible to see values associated with a single POI clicking the correspondent pin on the map:
- Data and trends: a set of performance or status indicator of various nature, shown with a couple of widgets for each indicator, the first one showing last value, the latter showing value time trend;
- Events vs Map, a list of events of interest (recreative events, city alarms, traffic events…) and their position on a map;
- Microapp and services, a list of micro-applications shown on a map;
- Fully custom: to create a new dashboard from scratch, choosing from all available widgets;
- IOT devices, a dashboard with actuators connected to new or existing IOT devices;
- IOT Application, a dashboard with widgets (both data visualizer and actuators) connected to IOT applications;
- My Private Data: a dashboard showing user’s private data, coming from the user’s personal devices, personal KPI, POI etc.
- Empty Dashboard: to create a new empty dashboard without instantiating any widget.
- For example, select the “Data and Trends” Dashboard template (2a), and choose “My Dashboard Data Monitoring” as title (2b). Now click the blue “Next” button at the bottom (2c) to proceed through the next steps provided by the Wizard.
- The next Wizard tab “Data and Widgets” is organized as in the following (see the picture):