Waldo Smeets .com

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam launched a really cool noise monitoring system a few months ago. See It was created with Flex 1.5 as a flexible dashboard with a huge amount of data. The purpose is to display current noise emission data from airplanes that are in the Schiphol area.

The application uses a number of web services to get this data and they’re iterating the web service request to get the actual noise data (this would make a great messaging application in Flex 2).

The map application that shows the noise emissions at different places around Schiphol airport

I think this app is a great example of governmental dashboards, helping the government to better communicate with people. The airport is located very close to several major cities in The Netherlands and many citizens complain about too much noise pollution.

If I followed the politic situation well, the government tried to judge Schiphol based on the number of complaint calls that were received. However, wouldn’t it be better to judge on facts, instead of calls (some people are known to call the complaint phone number dozens of times a day, just to create more work for Schiphol in handling them).

Hence this dashboard, it’s trying to represent more accurate data and I guess they hope to give the citizens better feelings about the noice reduction.

But… the story is not finished yet. It happened to be that there’s also an organisation responsible for registering all the complaints they receive. In the past, this was a manual process. Now, another Adobe partner created a Flex form and management application with dashboard for this process as well. (read more at http://www.joh-enschede.com/?page=media&cid=2 and there is a Dutch study report as well).

So here you go… Flex all over to help the government to handle this ‘issue’. Dashboards for citizens, dashboards for government employees and rich forms for all 😉