The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
OpenStreetMap is still surprisingly incomplete when it comes to showing buildings for the London area, this is a real contrast to other places (e.g. Birmingham, New York City, Paris) when it comes to completeness of buildings, this is despite some good datasets (e.g Ordnance Survey OpenMap Local) including building outlines. It’s one reason why I … Continue reading OpenStreetMap: London Building Coverage →
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Here’s a graphic I’ve made by taking a number of screenshots of DataShine Commute graphics, showing the different methods of travelling to work in the City of London, that is, the Square Mile area at the heart of London where hundreds of thousands and financial and other employees work. All the maps are to the … Continue reading The City of London Commute →
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Last week I was in China for the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Spatial Data Mining (ICSDM), travelling with the my centre director who was keynoting and giving a day’s teaching at the conference’s accompanying summer school. The conference was based in Fuzhou University, on the western edge of Fuzhou in Fujian Province, a city … Continue reading China: ICSDM Conference →
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The Tube Line Closure Map accesses Transport for London’s REST API for line disruption information (both live and planned) and uses the information there to animate a geographical vector map of the network, showing closed sections as lines flashing dots, with solid lines for unaffected parts. The idea is similar to TfL’s official disruption map, … Continue reading Tube Line Closure Map →
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The latest web map in the DataShine website portfolio is DataShine Election, which shows results from the 2015 and 2010 UK General Elections.
You can view the interactive map or read more about it.
When I first moved to UCL CASA back in 2010, the first online map I created from scratch was one showing swings in the general election that year. So it seemed fitting to update the old code with the data from the 2015 general election, which took place last week. You can see the resulting … Continue reading General Election Maps for 2015 →
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Above is an excerpt of a large, coloured-dot based graphic showing the locations of street trees in Rotherhithe, part of the London Borough of Southwark in London, as released by them to the OpenStreetMap database back in 2010. You can download the full version (12MB PDF). Street trees are trees on public land managed by … Continue reading Street Trees of Southwark →
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The week before last I was at GISRUK, the long-running annual conference for early (and not-so-early) career researchers in GI Science in the UK, Ireland and further afield. This year’s conference was in Leeds and attracted a record number of 200+ delegates. I presented a poster at a meeting the day before the main conference, … Continue reading GISRUK 2015 →
Continue reading »GIS software is used by many professionals to process spatial information, but the results are often poorly presented and the resulting map can be unattractive. GIS packages, such as QGIS, are increasingly including a broad range of cartographic styling and map design options, to present synthesised spatial data attractively, but it remains all too easy … Continue reading Book Review: GIS Cartography (2nd Ed) →
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I’ve created an Election 2015 Time Map which maps the estimated declaration times that the Press Association have published. It follows on from a similar map of the Scottish independence referendum. Each constituency is represented by a circle which is roughly in its centre (using a longest-interior-vertex centroid determined in QGIS). The area of the … Continue reading Election Time! →
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Stations on the tube map with multiple lines are normally shown with a white circle (except where obscured by a disabled access blob) indicating connections where you can change lines there, while continuing on a single journey (and so not have to pay for two). However, there are a number of connections not shown on … Continue reading Out of Station Interchanges (OSIs) →
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Ordnance Survey have this week released four new additions to their Open Data product suite. The four, which were announced earlier this month, are collectively branded as OS Open and include OS Open Map Local, which, like Vector Map District (VMD), is a vector dataset containing files for various feature types, such as building polygons … Continue reading OS Open →
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A friend forwarded me this article which discusses this paper by researchers at the Yahoo Labs offices in Barcelona and the University of Turin. The basic idea is that they crowdsourced prettiness of places in central London, via either/or pairs photographs, to build up a field of attractiveness, then adjusted a router based on this … Continue reading Taking the Scenic Route – Quantitatively? →
Continue reading »An encouraging announcement from BIS (the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) a few days ago regarding future Open Data products from the Ordnance Survey (press release here) and the Ordnance Survey – two pieces of good news: The OS will be launching a new, detailed set of vector data as Open Data at the … Continue reading Ordnance Survey Open Data – The Next Level of Detail →
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Many of my visualisations have focused on London – there is an advantage of being in the city and surrounded by the data, which means that London is often the “default” city to map. However, I’ve created a couple of Manchester versions of my popular maps Ward Words and Ward Work. Logistics and time reasons … Continue reading Manchester – Languages and Jobs →
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I’ll be gradually tweaking this article to add/amend sources, clarifications and develop some of my arguments. A big announcement for the “Boris Bikes” today, aka Barclays Cycle Hire. London’s bikeshare system, the second largest in the western world after Paris’s Velib and nearly five years old, will be rebranded as Santander Cycles, and the bikes … Continue reading Seeing Red: 15 Ways the Boris Bikes of London Could be Better →
Continue reading »Various websites I’ve built, and mentioned here on oobrien.com from time to time, are down until Monday lunchtime, due to a major power upgrade for the building that the server is in. This affects the following websites: DataShine CDRC Bike Share Map Tube Tongues OpenOrienteeringMap (extremely degraded) Some other smaller visualisations However the following are … Continue reading Downtime →
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GeoComputation: A Practical Primer, edited by Profs Chris Brunsdon and Alex Singleton, has just been published by SAGE. The book acts both as a reference guide to the field and as a guide to help you get to know aspects of it. Each chapter includes a worked example with step-by-step instructions. Each chapter has a … Continue reading GeoComputation: A Practical Primer →
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How many of London’s 32 boroughs (& the City of London) would you pass through on a single end-to-end journey on the tube? It turns out that if you travel the length of the Piccadilly Line (Uxbridge branch), then, in a single journey, you’ll pass through 14 boroughs and stop at all of them but … Continue reading London Boroughs and Tube Lines →
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Here is a guide to clone a WordPress(.org) blog, on the same server, 10 steps, on Linux, You’ll definitely need admin access to the blog itself, and probably to the database and server too, depending on your setup. I did this recently as I needed a copy of an existing production site, to hack on. … Continue reading Quick-and-Dirty WordPress Site Cloning →
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<rant> Three maps with glaring errors which I came across yesterday. I’m hesitant to criticise – many of my own maps have, I am sure, issues too (i.e. my Electric Tube map, on the right, is deliberately way off.) But I couldn’t resist calling out this trio which I spotted within a few hours of … Continue reading Bad Maps →
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As part of a project to move most of my OpenLayers 2-powered websites to OpenLayers 3, I have recently converted two more – DataShine: Travel to Work Flows and the North/South Interactive Map. Unlike the main DataShine: Census website, both of these newer conversions include vector geospatial data, so there was additional learning involved during … Continue reading OpenLayers 3 and Vector Data →
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This post is cross-posted from oobrien.com. OpenLayers is a powerful web mapping API that DataShine uses to display full-page “slippy” maps. DataShine: Census has recently been upgraded to use OpenLayers 3. Previously it was powered by OpenLayers 2, so it doesn’t sound like a major change, but OL3 is a major rewrite and as such … Continue reading OpenLayers 3 →
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OpenLayers is a powerful web mapping API that many of my websites use to display full-page “slippy” maps. DataShine: Census has been upgraded to use OpenLayers 3. Previously it was powered by OpenLayers 2, so it doesn’t sound like a major change, but OL3 is a major rewrite and as such it was quite an … Continue reading OpenLayers 3 and DataShine →
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As a weekend project, I’ve made an interactive version of my London North/South artwork. As well as the blue and red house silhouettes, assembled in QGIS, I’ve added in GeoJSON files of the River Thames (from Ordnance Survey Vector Map District, like the buildings) and of tube/DLR/Overground stations – the location/name/network data is from this […]
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One of the more spatially interesting datasets on DataShine: Census is about central heating – do houses have it, and what is the fuel source? The table is QS415EW and here’s what one of the categories look like on DataShine. You’ll notice a distinctive pattern, with city centres and the countryside having low proportions of […]
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Britain’s “top” primary roads – the A1, A2, A3… to A9 – are arranged in a particular pattern, with the A1-A6 radiating out clockwise from London and the A7 to A9 similarly radiating around Edinburgh. I used Gemma, an old UCL CASA project that Steve and I worked on back in 2011, to draw, from […]
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Cross-posted from Mapping London, edited slightly. This is a map of geolocated Tweets for the whole world – I’ve zoomed into London here. The map was created by Eric Fischer of Mapbox, who collected the tweets over several years. The place where each tweet is posted from is shown by a green dot. There are […]
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This book, which features great examples of London building architecture, is itself distinctively designed and immaculately presented. It’s been out for a couple of years now, however I was recommended it when purchasing another book recently on Amazon, as an impulse purchase, it’s an excellent find. The book was authored by Hannah Dipper and Robin […]
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I contributed a number of graphics to LONDON: The Information Capital, a book co-written by Dr James Cheshire, also of UCL Geography. Two of my graphics that made it into the book were based on data from OpenStreetMap, a huge dataset of spatial data throughout the world. This first graphic forms one of the chapter […]
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If you are a Londoner but felt that Tube Tongues passed you by, maybe because you live in south-east London or another part of the city that doesn’t have a tube station nearby, then here’s a special version of Tube Tongues for you. Like the original, it maps the most popularly spoken language after English […]
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DataShine Census has two new features – local area rescaling and data download. The features were launched at the UK Data Service‘s Census Research User Conference, last week at the Royal Statistical Society. Local Area Rescaling This helps draw out demographic versions in the current view. You may be in a region where a particular […]
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Cross-posted from the Datashine Blog. DataShine Census has two new features – local area rescaling and data download. The features were launched at the UK Data Service‘s Census Research User Conference, last week at the Royal Statistical Society. Local Area Rescaling This helps draw out demographic versions in the current view. You may be in […]
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As a followup to Tube Tongues I’ve published Working Lines which is exactly the same concept, except it looks at the occupation statistics from the 2011 census, and shows the most popular occupation by tube station. Again, lots of spatial clustering of results, and some interesting trends come out – for example, the prevalence of […]
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I’ve extended my map of tube journeys and busy stations (previous article here) to add in an interesting metric from the 2011 census – that of the second most commonly spoken language (after English) that people who live nearby speak. To do this I’ve analysed all “output areas” which wholly or partly lie within 200m […]
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I was in Vienna for most of last week, presenting at a satellite workshop of the GIScience conference, before joining the main event for the latter part of the week. GIScience is a biennial international academic conference, alternating between America and Europe. At the intersection between geography, GIS and information visualisation. It is very much […]
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I’m presenting a short paper today at the Uncertainty Workshop at GIScience 2014 in Vienna, looking at cartographic methods of showing uncertainty in the new OAC 2011 geodemographic maps of the UK using textures and hatching to the quality of fit of areas to their defined “supergroup” geodemographic cluster. Mapnik was used – its compositing […]
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A final update to my Scottish Independence Referendum Data Map – the circle borders now show the turnout percentage, with the highest (>90%) as a solid green, the lowest showing as red. There is a weak (R^2 = 0.177) negative correlation between the Yes vote %, and the Turnout %, suggesting that the Yes campaign […]
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As a learning exercise, I have attempted to “migrate” my #indyref map from OpenLayers 2.13.1 to OpenLayers 3.0.0. It seemed a good time to learn this, because the OpenLayers website now shows v3 as the default version for people to download and use. I use the term “migrate” in inverted commas, because, really, OpenLayers 3 […]
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