Theme Park Maps!
It’s a lovely sunny day in London today, with tem […]
Continue reading »Author: Oliver O`Brien
I’m Oliver O’Brien, a researcher and software developer at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), a research group at UCL in London.
More Cities, More Bikes, More Data
I presented some research I’ve carried out at CASA, at the Cycle City conference in Leeds last week. The research shows how the numbers of bikeshare bikes and docking stations have varied between 2010 and 2014, for 46 systems across the world (not all systems have numbers for whole period of study). The numbers are […]
Continue reading »
This Place
This Place is a visualisation of 2011 Census data for England and Wales, for your local area. I’ve been meaning to adapt Michal Miguski‘s This Tract for the 2011 UK Census, ever since I saw it a couple of years … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
The London Bike Share Marches North
It’s not just Wandsworth and Fulham that will be getting Barclays Cycle Hire in the next year or so when Phase 3 goes live – Hackney and Islington will be getting a few too. The iconic “Boris Bikes” will be … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
A Map of Scotland’s Deprivation
About this time last year, I created a “Map of the Geodemographics of Great Britain” which included the Output Area classifications (OAC) for GB, based on the 2001 Census, and also included the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) for England, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Google Doodle for London Underground’s 150th Anniversary
Google has replaced their normal logo with a special “Doodle” for today, celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the London Underground today. The graphic is a stylised version of the iconic…
Continue reading »
Me, Geolocated on Twitter
I was prompted by the excellent Twitter Tongues map, where geolocated tweets in London (including mine, and those from hundreds of thousands of others) were mined by Ed Manley over the summer, and then mapped by James Cheshire, to see … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Paris Workshop on Bike Sharing Systems
I attended a one-day workshop last week, hosted by IFSTTAR’s GERI Animatic research group at École des Ponts ParisTech just east of Paris. The workshop was on Bicycle Sharing Systems, and as I have recently been working with a couple … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
A Periodic Table for London
Here is a webpage that uses my own CityDashboard API*, to build a Periodic-Table inspired “data artwork” of live London information, as a series of coloured square panels on a website. The squares update regularly with fresh information, and throb … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Update to CityDashboard CSV API & iPad Wall!
I’ve made some minor alterations to the CSV API for CityDashboard. The main changes are in the metadata rows (the top two) rather than the subsequent rows. Specifically, the top metadata row has now split out the description, source and … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
The Electric Tube
In six weeks time, London will have a second orbital railway. The Circle Line has been running for just over 100 years, and on 9 December will be joined by the latest addition to Transport for London (TfL)’s Overground network … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Boundary Change Map
I pulled together this interactive map of Proposed Constituency Boundary Changes in England, after the information was released by the Boundary Commission for England last week. My colleague James Cheshire highlighted that this kind of map could be illuminating, particularly … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Prism: A Real-life CityDashboard
I was at the V&A earlier today to see Prism, a new installation by digital artist Keiichi Matsuda which is part of the London Design Festival. Prism uses data from UCL CASA’s CityDashboard and other London open data sources, to … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Behind the Scenes at the British Library Map Room
I was lucky enough to be on a private tour of the British Library Map Room, as part of the Society of Cartographers conference at the beginning of the month. The tour showed some of the treasures of the Map … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Mapping London Presentation for the Society of Cartographers Conference
I presented on the Mapping London blog, at the Society of Cartographers’ 48th Annual Conference which was at UCL this year, showing a general outline of the blogs and some maps featured on it, plus some work done by James … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
CityDashboard Weather Forecasts – Yahoo! to the Rescue
After Google abruptly turned off their XML weather feed this week, I’ve switched to using Yahoo! Weather (an RSS feed) for the CityDashboard weather forecast module. Yahoo uses WOEIDs rather than city names, which takes a bit longer to configure … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Bike Share Operators and Social Media – User Engagement with Twitter
Many of the bike share operators whose systems I’ve mapped have accounts on Twitter – but do they use them to reply to customers, notify of system changes, or just tweet promotional measures? Have they built up an appropriately large … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Velo-City Review
I was in Vancouver at the end of June for the Velo-City conference – which is the cycling industry’s conference on bike sharing and urban cycling. The lead sponsors were PBSC who are behind the technology for many of the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Olympic Venue Tweets on CityDashboard
There’s a new, temporary panel on the London CityDashboard which shows Twitter activity at the London 2012 venues. The panel is using data from new Twitter collector tools in the Big Data Toolkit, which being developed by my colleague Steven James Gray as part of his PhD. For each venue, the collectors count the number […]
Continue reading »
How to “Boris Bike” to the Olympic Park
Yes! It is possible! There may not be any Barclays Cycle Hire docking stations in the Olympic Park itself, possibly due to “Barclays” not being the official financial services provider of the Olympics but more likely because of the logistics of rebalancing flows to/from major events and the safety aspects of a crowded space, but […]
Continue reading »
Six Degrees of Twitter
This is my Twitter social graph. Click on the graphic to see a larger version. Key The font sizes for the names correspond to the number of followers, while the colour ramp (light grey to yellow to blue) is proportional to the number of listings per follower. That is, someone who has a small number […]
Continue reading »Velo-City Preview
[Updated] I’ll be presenting at Velo-City in Vancouver later this week. Velo-City is the “world’s premier cycling planning conference”. It is likely to have a significant bike-sharing flavour – the lead sponsor being PBSC which designed the 6000-odd “Boris Bikes” (aka Barclays Cycle Hire bikes) that are a distinctive sight in central London, as well […]
Continue reading »CityDashboard – the API
Here is the API documentation for CityDashboard. It’s really not a very advanced API, and it’s not delivered in a “proper” format (e.g. XML or JSON), instead it’s available as a number of CSV/TXT-formatted files. It ain’t pretty but it … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The MySQL Groupwise Maximum Problem
There is a surprisingly difficult task to solve with MySQL queries, which I’ve been spending some time trying to do – the Groupwise Maximum problem. This is the name for the type of query that I was trying, although in … Continue reading →
Continue reading »NYC’s Bike Share Approaches
New York City last week released a preliminary map showing the proposed sites for the launch of its bike sharing scheme, now named Citi Bike (with Citigroup being the lead sponsor along with Mastercard). Citigroup’s sponsorship is crucial for the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »WhereCampEU 2012
I was at the third WhereCampEU “unconference” which took place in Amsterdam over the last weekend of April, following previous editions in London and Berlin which I was also at. The meeting was an ideal opportunity for me to feature … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Modal Council Tax Bands in England
Here’s a map of England, overlaid on it is a choropleth map showing the modal (i.e most common) council tax band within each Census Output Area (OA) in England, based on March 2011 data released by the Office of National … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The London Data Table
The London Data Table was one of my personal favourites from the exhibition accompanying the CASA “Smart Cities” conference which took place at the University of London last Friday. The concept was thought up by Steven Gray and it consists … Continue reading →
Continue reading »On Colour Ramps and City Dashboards
Here are the colour ramps I am using for numeric measures in the recently launched CityDashboard (which by the way now has a new URL – http://citydashboard.org/): The colours have been designed to be clearly distinguishable from the white text … Continue reading →
Continue reading »CityDashboard
CityDashboard is the main project that I have been working on for the last few months. It aims to summarise quantitative data (both officially provided and crowd-sourced) for the major UK cities, in a single screen. Point data is also … Continue reading →
Continue reading »CASA Smart Cities
[Updated x2] Just a note to say that I will be presenting some of my work, at the CASA Smart Cities free one-day conference. Over 200 tickets have already gone, but there are, at the time of writing, a few … Continue reading →
Continue reading »So How Big Was the Big London Bike Share Expansion?
As planned, Tower Hamlets (east London) and Shepherd’s Bush (west London) saw a big expansion of bike share docking stations, overnight last Wednesday night. There’s also been some incremental additions to the existing zone, and a build-out of Camden Town … Continue reading →
Continue reading »London Bikeshare Expanding East and West
The Barclays Cycle Hire bikesharing system (map) in London is due for a major expansion on 8 March. Overnight on the 7th, operators will be working flat out to add 2300 1700 1900 new bikes into 4800 3000 3400 new … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Extracting Feature Geometries from OpenStreetMap
I’ve recently been extracting some river geometries for major cities around the world. The data needs to be a list of latitude/longitude coordinates, representing the nodes on the shape for the river concerned. I’m sure there’s easier ways to do … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Rank Clocks and Maps: Spatiotemporal Visualisation of Ordered Datasets
Rank Clocks are a type of visualisation invented by Prof Michael Batty here at UCL CASA. They are time-based line charts, wrapped around a clockface – with the start date at the top, wrapping around clockwise to the end date. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Reworking Booth: Geodemographics of Housing
I’ve created a new visualisation, a dasymetric map of housing demographics which you can see here, which attempts to improve on the common thematic (a.k.a. choropleth) maps – a traditional example is shown below – where areas across the country … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Tube Colours
Transport for London (TfL) take their colours extremely seriously – the London Underground, in particularly, uses colour extensively to brand each line, and the maps and liveries are very well known. The organisation has a colour guide to ensure that, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Mappiness – A Personal Mood Map
The Mappiness project is run by one of CASA’s technology superstars Dr George MacKerron – it was his Ph.D project at LSE. The project, which is still going, aims to quantify happiness based on environmental factors, such as location, views … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Bike Share Route Fluxes
Capital Bikeshare, the bike sharing system for Washington DC and Arlington, recently released the data on their first 1.3 million journeys. Boston’s Hubway bike sharing system also released journey data for around 5000 journeys across an October weekend, as part … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Run Every Street in Edinburgh – in Strict Alphabetical Order
…it sounds like one heck of a lot of running. But Murray Strain, one of Scotland’s top terrain runners, is counting on it for his basic training. He’s logging the whole venture, which is based on his trusty Edinburgh A-Z. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »