The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
For a project on transport data I needed access to the National Rail timetables to calculate passing points for trains at every station. The National Public Transport Data Repository (NPTDR) TransXChange data is available for download on the data.gov.uk site, but it’s easier to download from the Department for Transport site: http://data.dft.gov.uk/NPTDR/index.html TransXChange is an … Read more →
Continue reading »I’ve been looking at the D3.js library for data visualisation in Javascript. This is the new evolution of Protovis from the Stanford Visualization group, and uses SVG to create dynamic visualisations from raw data. What interests me is how large archives of geospatial datasets can be searched for relevant information. On MapTube at the moment … Read more →
Continue reading »Version 1.42 of the Image Cutter software was released yesterday. This includes the addition of a template to allow the use of Google’s API v3. This version of the Google Maps API doesn’t require an API key and works better than v2 does on mobile devices like iPhones, iPads and Android tablets. You can download […]
Continue reading »This started out as an experiment in how to handle geospatial data published in Internet data stores. The idea was to make an attempt at structuring the data to make searching, comparison and visualisation easier. The London Datastore publish a manifest file which contains links to CSV files that are in the correct format for … Read more →
Continue reading »This is starting to become obsessive, but I can’t help wondering how many trains are running on the London Underground and where they all are. The Trackernet web service released by TfL allows you to see all the running boards for stations on a line, but doesn’t tell you where all the trains are. I did […]
Continue reading »In the previous three parts, I outlined the plan for getting geometry from MapTube via C Sharp into an FBX file using the C++ SDK provided by Autodesk. This final part shows data in a world map exported from MapTube and imported into 3DS Max. The above image shows the world countries 2010 outline from […]
Continue reading »The first two parts of the FBX export process dealt with getting the FBX SDK working and exporting some simple geometry. Now what’s required is the ability to pass complex geometry from the MapTube side using C# over to the FBX side using C++. The obvious way to do this is to pass the geometry […]
Continue reading »In the first FBX exporter post I got to the point where the export of simple geometry from one of the Autodesk SDK examples could be loaded by the Quicktime plugin. This used the SDK as a multithreaded statically linked library which I used with one of the examples to create a plane object. The following […]
Continue reading »I’ve been looking at how to export the geographic information contained in a MapTube map into an art tool like 3DS Max or Maya. The reason for this is firstly to make it easier to produce high quality geographic presentations, but also, by employing a recognised art tool chain, we can also get the data […]
Continue reading »I’ve been meaning to look at TfL’s Trackernet API for a while now. It works through a REST based web service which gives access to all the London Underground running boards on a line by line basis. You issue an http request of the form: http://cloud.tfl.gov.uk/TrackerNet/PredictionSummary/V and the result is an XML file containing train information for […]
Continue reading »With all the media hype surrounding the use of social networking and the London riots, it left me wondering what was actually being said on Twitter in the UK. It was also a good opportunity to test out the new MapTube map creation software which can handle 35,000 clickable points on a map with ease […]
Continue reading »I’ve been looking at web-based sources of geographic data and Wikipedia links are something I’ve wanted to try out for a while. I found the following page containing Worldwide fossil sites: List of fossil sites This gives a list of sites, but with no locations: The “Site” column contains href links which can be followed to pages […]
Continue reading »We released a new feature on the MapTube website today which will make it easier to create new maps from data in CSV files. The underlying technology is used on the SurveyMapper site and for other real-time visualisations like http://bigdatatoolkit.org/2011/07/26/1yeartogo/ which shows tweets using the #1yeartogo hashtag for the London 2012 Olympics. The new update to […]
Continue reading »A lot of the maps I have created over the last few years have started out as tabular data in PDF documents. A recent BBC London report contained a dataset obtained from TfL of all the schools in London which are within 150 metres of a road carrying 10,000 vehicles a day or more. The report is a […]
Continue reading »Prompted by the final space shuttle launch of Atlantis, I thought I would have another look at two line elements (TLEs). These are coded lines of data that describe the orbital dynamics of a space vehicle. The last time I looked at this was when I was working on a GPS tracking project and we wanted […]
Continue reading »It’s been a while since I did any Fortran. I’ve been looking into contouring algorithms and decided to have a look at Paul Bourke’s Conrec program that was originally published in Byte magazine in 1987: http://paulbourke.net/papers/conrec The graph above shows the underlying data values as a coloured square grid with the black contour lines on […]
Continue reading »I’ve created a new html template for the GMapCreator that uses Google’s API v3. In addition to not requiring the API key which is locked to the URL, this also means that you can take advantage of Google’s new styled maps base layers and Fusion table overlays. The following map shows UK geology as the […]
Continue reading »Using the GMapCreator on a 64 bit laptop recently, I found myself without access to a 32 bit Java Virtual Machine. As the Windows native version of the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) project that the GMapCreator depends on is 32 bit only, I needed to use the pure Java version of JAI. It’s not immediately […]
Continue reading »I’ve been looking at the Weather Underground API (http://wiki.wunderground.com/index.php/API_-_XML) which gives access to the observation stations and the data they are collecting. The API uses simple commands to query for a list of stations, for example: http://api.wunderground.com/auto/wui/geo/GeoLookupXML/index.xml?query=london,united+kingdom Using C# and .net, this is accomplished as follows: WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(string.Format(GeoLookupXML, @”london,united+kingdom”)); HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse(); XmlDocument […]
Continue reading »Recently, BBC Look East have been running a “Broadband Speed Survey”, asking people to use an online tester to check their broadband speed, and then enter the value, along with their postcode, into SurveyMapper. This generated 16,311 responses to the survey, but for each response people get to view the map containing the latest data, […]
Continue reading »We’ve just updated the MapTube website with a new release of the software that makes all of the Census maps clickable. Anything tagged with the “CENSUS2001″ keyword is clickable, as well as most of the maps made from the data on the London DataStore. The new clickable map icon. This is used to turn the clickable maps feature […]
Continue reading »Using the General Election 2010 results spreadsheet from the Guardian Data Blog, we’ve produced three MapTube maps showing the distribution of votes for the three main parties: The maps can be viewed on MapTube at the following link: http://www.maptube.org/election/map.aspx?s=DGxUpxGSnLKhUzLIOMHBwKeUwKZUyEDAwcCnksCjlMhBwMHAp5LAoTbd Use the red slider buttons to fade the distributions for the three parties up and down. […]
Continue reading »With 649 of the 650 parliamentary seats from the 6th May 2010 General Election now declared, we can see how the policital map of the UK has changed. The one remaining seat is Thirsk and Malton where the death of one of the candidates means that the vote has been postponed until 25th May. This map has been […]
Continue reading »With the recent release of the OS Free Data and the up-coming election, I’ve been looking at Parliamentary Constituencies boundaries. It’s not clear from the accompanying documentation which boundary set the OS Free Data is based on, but the following image should clarify things. This is from the OS Free Data: Now compare that to the […]
Continue reading »There has been quite a lot of interest about using Twitter to crowd source snow amounts, but I couldn’t help wondering how this compares to the data available from the Met Office observing network. Over the period from 20 December 2009 to 15 January 2010 I downloaded the synoptic information from the Department of Atmospheric […]
Continue reading »While playing around with 3DS Max 2009 for some of our GENeSIS work, I happened to notice that it’s now possible to use .net assemblies in MaxScript. My first thought was to use this for some of our agent based modelling work, but when Fabian Neuhaus asked about importing GPX files, I saw a really easy way of […]
Continue reading »John Conway’s “Game of Life” was one of the first things I ever wrote in Java, back in the days when we were using 1.1. This is a slight variation on the traditional 2D view, where the alife simulation is wrapped around a spinning globe. The results are shown below, along with the link to […]
Continue reading »It’s actually a stacked bar chart rather than a traditional population pyramid, but the image below shows male/female population by age for all the output areas in England. The red thematic overlay is total population for every OA, which can be clicked to get the age group breakdown shown in the popup window. This map […]
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