#1yeartogo visualisation
London 2012 is only 1 year away! This is an exciting time for London and the UK in general. The new stadiums are nearly complete and most of the tickets for the events have already been sold. Hopefully if you applied for a ticket you got one!
Behind the scenes here at BigDataToolKit and at CASA, I have been busy building different systems that will allow anyone to collect and analyse big, actually massive, data sets. One of the first proofs of concepts was the ability to collect real time live data from Twitter, which resulted in the fantastic Tweet-o-Meter. The meters have been running non-stop for the last 18 months now and are still as popular as the day we launched them. The obvious next stage was to create another exciting live visualisation that shows the data on a map.
To celebrate, I’m collecting Tweets that contain the hashtag #1yeartogo since today just so happens to coincide with 366 days until the Olympic torch is lit in the capital. You can view the 2 live heat maps here:
http://bigdata.casa.ucl.ac.uk/2012/
The first map shows a worldwide heat map of all tweets containing the #1yeartogo hashtag and the other shows the tweets within a 50km radius of the center of London. In the first 3 hours of collection there were over 5,000 geo-located tweets in the database! The official launch of the hashtag #1yeartogo is still another 18 hours away! Explore the 2 maps and see which areas are tweeting the most! Each map automatically updates every 5 minutes.
These visualisations show the first live test of our new heat map visualisation that will be made available to the general public in the next few weeks on MapTube. Many thanks go to Richard Milton who has been working hard over the past few months on these upgrades.
In the next few months I’ll be adding to the Toolkit and cleaning up the source code as well as throwing in some more exciting visuals. The official date I start working full time on the Toolkit is November 2011. Very soon after that you’ll be able to grab a copy of the toolkit and start creating your own collections to share with everyone around the world. As always your comments are important so have your say and let me know what you think!