The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
The afternoon of the first day of Eye on Earth (see previous post for an opening ceremony and the morning sessions) had multiple tracks. I selected to attend Addressing policy making demand for data; dialogue between decision makers and providers The speakers were asked to address four points that address issues of data quality control and … Continue reading Eye on Earth (Day 1 – afternoon)
Four years after the first Eye on Earth Summit (see my reflections about the 2011 event here, and the Dublin meeting in 2013 here), the second summit is being held in Abu Dhabi. Eye on Earth is a meeting that is dedicated to the coordination of environmental information sharing at all scales so it can … Continue reading Eye on Earth (day 1 – morning)
Four years after the first Eye on Earth Summit (see my reflections about the 2011 event here, and the Dublin meeting in 2013 here), the second summit is being held in Abu Dhabi. Eye on Earth is a meeting that is dedicated to the coordination of environmental information sharing at all scales so it can … Continue reading Eye on Earth (day 1 – morning) – opening and the need for data
Considering how long Reneé Sieber (McGill University) and I know each other, and working in similar areas (participatory GIS, participatory geoweb, open data, socio-technical aspects of GIS, environmental information), I’m very pleased that a collaborative paper that we developed together is finally published. The paper ‘The epistemology(s) of volunteered geographic information: a critique‘ took some … Continue reading New paper: The epistemology(s) of volunteered geographic information: a critique
Considering how long Reneé Sieber (McGill University) and I know each other, and working in similar areas (participatory GIS, participatory geoweb, open data, socio-technical aspects of GIS, environmental information), I’m very pleased that a collaborative paper that we developed together is finally published. The paper ‘The epistemology(s) of volunteered geographic information: a critique‘ took some … Continue reading New paper: The epistemology(s) of volunteered geographic information: a critique
The London based Building Centre organised an evening event – from Mapping to Making – which looked at the “radical evolution in the making and meaning of maps is influencing creative output. New approaches to data capture and integration – from drones to crowd-sourcing – suggest maps are changing their impact on our working life, … Continue reading Building Centre – from Mapping to Making
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Image 1. The tweet density from 8am to 4pm on 20th June 2015, Central London
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Table 1. The Number of Geo-Coded Tweets in the UK on 20th June, 2015
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| Image 2. The density of Geo-Coded Tweets in the UK on 20th June, 2015 |
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Image 3. The plan view of Central London model
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Image 4. The perspective view of Central London model
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Image 5. The perspective view of Central London model (view from BT Tower)
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Image 6. The tweet density between 10am and 11am on 20th June 2015
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Image 7. The tweet density between 12pm and 1pm on 20th June 2015
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Image 8. The tweet density from 12am to 12pm
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Image 9. The tweet density from 12pm to Midnight
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Image 10. The tweet density in 3d between 10am and 11am on 20th June 2015
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Image 11. The tweet density in 3d between 12pm and 1pm on 20th June 2015
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Image 12. The tweet density in 3d from 12am to 8pm
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Image 13. The tweet density in 3d from 8am to 4pm
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Image 14. The tweet density from 4pm to Midnight
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[3] Nicolas Belmonte, #interactive/Andes, http://twitter.github.io/interactive/andes/ (Strived on 15th August 2015)
[4] Andy Hudson-Smith, London’s Twitter Island – From ArcGIS to Max to Lumion, http://www.digitalurban.org/2012/01/londons-twitter-island-from-arcgis-to.html#comment-7314
(Strived on 15thAugust 2015)
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Image 1. The tweet density from 8am to 4pm on 20th June 2015, Central London
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Table 1. The Number of Geo-Coded Tweets in the UK on 20th June, 2015
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| Image 2. The density of Geo-Coded Tweets in the UK on 20th June, 2015 |
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Image 3. The plan view of Central London model
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Image 4. The perspective view of Central London model
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Image 5. The perspective view of Central London model (view from BT Tower)
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Image 6. The tweet density between 10am and 11am on 20th June 2015
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Image 7. The tweet density between 12pm and 1pm on 20th June 2015
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Image 8. The tweet density from 12am to 12pm
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Image 9. The tweet density from 12pm to Midnight
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Image 10. The tweet density in 3d between 10am and 11am on 20th June 2015
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Image 11. The tweet density in 3d between 12pm and 1pm on 20th June 2015
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Image 12. The tweet density in 3d from 12am to 8pm
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Image 13. The tweet density in 3d from 8am to 4pm
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Image 14. The tweet density from 4pm to Midnight
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[3] Nicolas Belmonte, #interactive/Andes, http://twitter.github.io/interactive/andes/ (Strived on 15th August 2015)
[4] Andy Hudson-Smith, London’s Twitter Island – From ArcGIS to Max to Lumion, http://www.digitalurban.org/2012/01/londons-twitter-island-from-arcgis-to.html#comment-7314
(Strived on 15thAugust 2015)
Image 1. The tweet density from 8am to 4pm on 20th June 2015, Central London Twitter Mapping is increasingly useful method to link virtual activities and geographical space. Geo-tagged data attached to tweets containing the users’ location where the…
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We recently had published in ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information a paper entitled “Walk this Way: Improving Pedestrian Agent-Based Models through Scene Activity Analysis”. In the paper we explore how new data can help inform our agent-based…
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We recently had published in ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information a paper entitled “Walk this Way: Improving Pedestrian Agent-Based Models through Scene Activity Analysis”. In the paper we explore how new data can help inform our agent-based…
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The second day of the Data and City Workshop (here are the notes from day 1) started with the session Data Models and the City. Pouria Amirian started with Service Oriented Design and Polyglot Binding for Efficient Sharing and Analysing of Data in Cities. The starting point is that management of the city need data, and therefore … Continue reading Data and the City workshop (day 2)
I have just come back from the Lipari School on Computational Social Science which was focusing on Algorithms, Data, and Models for Social and Urban Systems. While there I gave a class entitled “GIS and Agent-based modeling” split over two parts. Below…
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I have just come back from the Lipari School on Computational Social Science which was focusing on Algorithms, Data, and Models for Social and Urban Systems. While there I gave a class entitled “GIS and Agent-based modeling” split over two parts. Below…
Continue reading »There are several applications that allow creating forms rapidly – such as Open Data Kit (ODK) or EpiCollect. Now, there is another offering from Esri, in the form of Survey123 app – which is explained in the video below. Survey123 is integrated into ArcGIS Online, so you need an ArcGIS account to use it (you … Continue reading Esri survey123 tool – rapid prototyping geographical citizen science tool
The GeoData Abstraction Library is a very popular library for converting and processing raster and vector data. It is used by popular GIS software such as the open source QGis, and can be used in proprietary software such as Esri’s ArcGis. It can also …
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The GeoData Abstraction Library is a very popular library for converting and processing raster and vector data. It is used by popular GIS software such as the open source QGis, and can be used in proprietary software such as Esri’s ArcGis. It can also …
Continue reading »
The GeoData Abstraction Library is a very popular library for converting and processing raster and vector data. It is used by popular GIS software such as the open source QGis, and can be used in proprietary software such as Esri’s ArcGis. It can also …
Continue reading »Call for papers on a special issue on past, present and future of Participatory GIS and Public Participation in GIS. In the 1990s, participatory GIS (PGIS) and Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) emerged as an approach and tool to make geospatial technologies more relevant and accessible to marginalized groups. The goal has been to integrate the qualitative … Continue reading Call for papers – special issue of the Cartographic Journal on Participatory GIS
COST Energic organised a second summer school that is dedicated to Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and citizen science. This time, the school was run by the Institute for Climate Change & Sustainable Development of the University of Malta. with almost 40 participants from across Europe and beyond (Brazil, New Zealand), and, of course, participants from … Continue reading COST Energic Summer School on VGI and Citizen Science in Malta
With the spring semester over, I thought I would show some of the final agent-based modeling projects that were carried out in CSS 645: Spatial Agent-based Models of Human-Environment Interactions. As always I was quite impressed the models and we had …
Continue reading »With the spring semester over, I thought I would show some of the final agent-based modeling projects that were carried out in CSS 645: Spatial Agent-based Models of Human-Environment Interactions. As always I was quite impressed the models and we had …
Continue reading »The COST Energic network is progressing in its 3rd year. The previous post showed one output from the action – a video that describe the links between volunteered geographic information and indigenous knowledge. The people who came to the meeting represent the variety of interest in crwodsourced geographic information, from people with background in Geography, … Continue reading COST ENERGIC meeting – Tallinn 21-22 May
The COST Energic network has been running now for 3 years, and one of the outputs from the network is the video below, which explore a very valuable form of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). This is information that is coming from participatory projects between researchers and indigenous communities, and this short film provide examples from Bolivia, British Columbia, … Continue reading VGI and indigenous knowledge – COST Energic Video
This time I’m at the Workshop: “Data Visualization from Different Universes”, presenting some work regarding the visualization of Tweets, using a combination of machine learning and GIS.
The last day of AAG 2015 is about citizen science and OpenStreetMap studies. The session Beyond motivation? Understanding enthusiasm in citizen science and volunteered geographic information was organised together with Hilary Geoghegan. We were interest to ‘explore and debate current research and practice moving beyond motivation, to consider the associated enthusiasm, materials and meanings of participating in citizen … Continue reading AAG 2015 – day 4 notes – Citizen Science & OpenStreetMap Studies
The sessions today covered Civic technology, citizen science, and the new directions in mapping – Open Source/Crowdsourcing/Big Data First, Civic technology: governance, equity and inclusion considerations, with Pamela Robinson – Ryerson University (Chair) and Peter A. Johnson – University of Waterloo, Teresa Scassa – University of Ottawa and Jon Corbett – University of British Columbia-Okanagan. The Discussant is Betsy Donald – … Continue reading AAG 2015 notes – day 3 – Civic Technology, Citizen Science, Crowdsourcing and mapping
The second day was dedicated to reflections on Public Participation GIS or Participatory GIS. The day was organised by Rina Ghose and Bandana Karr with some comments from Renee Sieber and me at some stage. It turned out to be an excellent symposium. The following are my notes from the different talks during the day. Jon … Continue reading AAG 2015 notes – day 2 – Public Participation GIS symposium
At 8:00 I’ve attended the Digital Connectivity, Inclusion, and Inequality at the World’s Economic Peripheries session asking ‘what difference people expect better connectivity to make at the world’s economic peripheries’. I took notes from the presentations of Nancy Ettlinger, Dorothea Kleine and Lisa Poggiali. Nancy Ettlinger analysed crwodsourcing from governance perspective – using Foucauldian analysis. She looks at … Continue reading AAG 2015 notes – day 1
The GIS Research UK conferences (GISRUK) are the annual gathering of the GIScience research community in the UK. While I have missed the last two (including the current one in Leeds), I have contributed to two papers that are presented in the conference. The first, ‘Participatory mapping for transformation: multiple visual representation of foodscapes and environment … Continue reading GISRUK 2015 papers: participatory mapping in Nairobi and mobile apps for Earthquake and Fire
In 2011-2012, together with Richard Treves, I was awarded a Google Faculty Research Award, and we were lucky to work with Paolo Battino for about a year, exploring how to use Google Earth tours for educational aims. The details of the projects and some reports from the project are available on Richard’s blog, who was leading … Continue reading New paper: Footprints in the sky – using student track logs in Google Earth to enhance learning
The Association of American Geographers conference is just around the corner – between 21 and 24 April, held in Chicago. I’ve already marked some sessions that I think worth noting (and was involved in the organisation of several sessions, too). Here is a list of interesting sessions, following suggestion to do so by David O’Sullivan and … Continue reading AAG sessions – Critical GIScience, GeoWeb and Citizen Science
At the request of Diana Sinton, the Executive Director of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), I gave the seminar talk about the linkage between Geographic Information Science and Citizen Science. A detailed description of the talk and the slides are available here. The webinar announcement is at http://ucgis.org/ucgis-webinars/geographic-information-citizen-science-reciprocal-opportunities. The webinar was recorded, so … Continue reading UCGIS webinar [Geographic information | Citizen] Science: reciprocal opportunities
A new book out about OpenStreetMap and Geographic Information Science. The book, which was edited by Jamal Jokar Arsanjani, Alexander Zipf, Peter Mooney, Marco Helbich is “OpenStreetMap in GISciene : Experiences, Research, and applications” contains 16 chapters on different aspects of OpenStreetMap in GIScience including 1) Data Management and Quality, 2) Social Context, 3) Network Modeling and … Continue reading OpenStreetMap in GIScience – Experiences, Research, and Applications
Recently I had another challenge, which I believe has the characteristics to be a common problem. I have a table with attributes, in CSV format, one of which is geospatial. CSV is a structured format for storing tabular data (text … Continue reading →
Chris Brunsdon and Alex Singleton recently edited a book entitled “Geocomputation: A Practical Primer“. The book covers a plethora of topics relating to geocomputation, and to quote from the website: “Chapters provide highly applied and practical discussions of:
- Visualization and exploratory spatial data analysis
- Space time modelling
- Spatial algorithms
- Spatial regression and statistics
- Enabling interactions through the use of neogeography ”
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| Representing the world as a series of layers of fixed and non-fixed objects (adapted from Benenson and Torrens, 2004). |
The chapter therefore introduces agent-based models to those interested in geocomputational methods, argues why such models should be used to study geographical problems before discussing how one can use GIS to create geographical explicit agent-based models. Through a series of examples we demonstrate how raster or vector spatial data can be used to model various aspects of our daily lives from that of the micro movement of pedestrians over seconds and minutes, to that of the macro patterns of urban growth over years and decades. By integrating spatial data and agent-based models at different spatial and temporal scales, such a modeling approach provides the flexibility to aid social scientists to explore the complex world that we inhabit.
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| A sample of application domains for spatial agent-based models discussed in the chapter. |
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| A simple example using MASON on how Agent-based models can be to used explore rush hour congestion: (A): Road and census data used for model inputs. (B) Zoomed in section of A with agents (red circles) moving towards Tyson’s Corner and causing traffic jams. |
Reference Cited:
Benenson, I. and Torrens, P.M. (2004), Geosimulation: Automata-Based Modelling of Urban Phenomena, John Wiley & Sons, London, UK.
Full Reference to Chapter:
Crooks, A.T. (2015), Agent-based Models and Geographical Information Systems, in Brunsdon, C. and Singleton, A. (eds.), Geocomputation: A Practical Primer, Sage, London, UK, pp. 63-77. (pdf)
Chris Brunsdon and Alex Singleton recently edited a book entitled “Geocomputation: A Practical Primer“. The book covers a plethora of topics relating to geocomputation, and to quote from the website: “Chapters provide highly applied and practical discussions of:
- Visualization and exploratory spatial data analysis
- Space time modelling
- Spatial algorithms
- Spatial regression and statistics
- Enabling interactions through the use of neogeography ”
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| Representing the world as a series of layers of fixed and non-fixed objects (adapted from Benenson and Torrens, 2004). |
The chapter therefore introduces agent-based models to those interested in geocomputational methods, argues why such models should be used to study geographical problems before discussing how one can use GIS to create geographical explicit agent-based models. Through a series of examples we demonstrate how raster or vector spatial data can be used to model various aspects of our daily lives from that of the micro movement of pedestrians over seconds and minutes, to that of the macro patterns of urban growth over years and decades. By integrating spatial data and agent-based models at different spatial and temporal scales, such a modeling approach provides the flexibility to aid social scientists to explore the complex world that we inhabit.
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| A sample of application domains for spatial agent-based models discussed in the chapter. |
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| A simple example using MASON on how Agent-based models can be to used explore rush hour congestion: (A): Road and census data used for model inputs. (B) Zoomed in section of A with agents (red circles) moving towards Tyson’s Corner and causing traffic jams. |
Reference Cited:
Benenson, I. and Torrens, P.M. (2004), Geosimulation: Automata-Based Modelling of Urban Phenomena, John Wiley & Sons, London, UK.
Full Reference to Chapter:
Crooks, A.T. (2015), Agent-based Models and Geographical Information Systems, in Brunsdon, C. and Singleton, A. (eds.), Geocomputation: A Practical Primer, Sage, London, UK, pp. 63-77. (pdf)
What does addresses got to do with economic theory and political dogma? turn out that quite a lot. As I was looking at the latest press release from the cabinet office, proudly announcing that the government is investing in (yet another) UK address database, I realised that the handling of UK addresses, those deceivingly simple […]
Thanks to invitations from UNIGIS and from Edinburgh Earth Observatory / AGI Scotland, I had an opportunity to reflect on how Geographic Information Science (GIScience) can contribute to citizen science, and what citizen science can contribute to GIScience. Despite the fact that it’s been 8 years since the term Volunteers Geographic Information (VGI) was coined, […]
“Urban form and function have been studied extensively in urban planning and geographic information science. However, gaining a greater understanding of how they merge to define the urban morphology remains a substantial scientific challenge. Towards this goal, this paper addresses the opportunities presented by the emergence of crowdsourced data to gain novel insights into form and function in urban spaces. We are focusing in particular on information harvested from social media and other open-source and volunteered datasets (e.g. trajectory and OpenStreetMap data). These data provide a first-hand account of form and function from the people who define urban space through their activities. This novel bottom-up approach to study these concepts complements traditional urban studies work to provide a new lens for studying urban activity. By synthesizing recent advancements in the analysis of open-source data we provide a new typology for characterizing the role of crowdsourcing in the study of urban morphology. We illustrate this new perspective by showing how social media, trajectory, and traffic data can be analyzed to capture the evolving nature of a city’s form and function. While these crowd contributions may be explicit or implicit in nature, they are giving rise to an emerging research agenda for monitoring, analyzing and modeling form and function for urban design and analysis.”
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| A typology of implicit and explicit form and function content |
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| Aggregation methods for varied scales of built environment analysis |
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| Neighborhood map and topic modeling results showing the mixture of social functions in each area. |
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| The persistent urban morphology concept. |
We hope you enjoy the paper.
Full Reference:
Crooks, A.T., Pfoser, D., Jenkins, A., Croitoru, A., Stefanidis, A., Smith, D. A., Karagiorgou, S., Efentakis, A. and Lamprianidis, G. (2015), Crowdsourcing Urban Form and Function, International Journal of Geographical Information Science. DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2014.977905 (pdf)
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