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Continuing with the story of the project's birth, we'd like to share how it all began.

The creation of CityScale was inspired by our fascination with computer-based city-building strategies. Specifically, Caesar III.

Interestingly, we had a version of the game that was localized by GSC Game World. Yes, that same GSC Game World that later created Cossacks and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. For some reason, the founders of the company don’t mention this part of their history. Maybe it wasn’t entirely official.

Back to our story. The idea was to transfer the simplicity of the gaming tools that allowed the creation and management of virtual cities into the real world. By doing so, we aimed to simplify the quality and cost of living assessment when choosing a place to live and city planning.

Initially, we thought that high-quality visualization and mechanics would solve, if not all, then most of the problems. However, over time, it became clear that the main issue was the lack of data, specifically open data. That’s when we began shifting our focus to its release.

Since then, we’ve prepared quite a few interesting open datasets, though even more are waiting for the right time to be published. So, this year we’ve planned an update to the open data section, counting on your support too.

On March 1st, we celebrate the official birthday of CityScale. It’s hard to believe how many years have already passed.

On this day, as always, the best gifts for us are new open data and your support.

It’s a pity that we mostly have to give ourselves these kinds of gifts.

This time, we managed to find some data about hot water outages in Kyiv.

This year we are celebrating 11th year of CityScale launch.

And, maybe, by no coincidence we are celebrating International Open Data Day at the same time.

The Day will last from the 2nd till the 8th of March. Yes, such an interesting day in a week long. :)

You can celebrate this day, week, or even a year by joining data opening with us.

This year we have one more remarkable annivarsary.

As well as the project, our open data portal has become ten years old. It is the first public ukrainian open data portal that we have launched in September of 2013.

The motivation behind was to free other developers from the need to search and process data by themselves, and let them concentrate on unique parts of their projects.

So, go create more projects based on open data.

Great news we have.

In the tough conditions of the russian war against Ukraine, we have changed our map engine to Leaflet from Ukrainian author-developer Volodymyr Agafonkin.

As a result, our maps work at least three times(3x) faster than before. You can see it with the naked eye.

What is more, we have got a better architecture that helps provide updates much easier. Therefore changes that have been postponed should be released much more quicker. Some of them are already released.

Oddly enough, we have chosen Bing Maps from Microsoft as a base map. They are better suited to our requirements.

Also, we have looked on Mapbox. But, unfortunately, they are not providing the Ukrainian language.

And as of OpenStreetMap, they are still disgracing with a statement about, whose is Crimea?

Glory to Ukraine!

The EU Datathon 2021 Finale is happening now, and we are competing there for the main prizes.
The results will be announced later this day.

Today we are officially releasing an international site localization in English.

For more details, you can check how European open data about crimes, public transport and schools in Dublin and London, look like.

UPD:

A crazy news we have!

CityScale has became EU Datathon 2021 finalist in a section "An economy that works for people".

According to the competition rules finalists will get prizes from 5 000 to 18 000 euros. And which one it will be we will find out at the finale - 25th of November.

We are starting our journey to Europe!