The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
There is something in the physical presence of book that is pleasurable. Receiving the copy of Introducing Human Geographies was special, as I have contributed a chapter about Geographic Information Systems to the ‘cartographies’ section. It might be a response to Ron Johnston critique of Human Geography textbooks or a decision by the editors to extend the […]
Georeferenced UK statistical data typically comes in one of two spatial coordinate reference systems – either latitude/longitude points based on the World Geodetic System 1984 (‘WGS 84′), or in the eastings/northings system of the British National Grid (based on the 1936 Ordnance Survey Great Britain datum ‘OSGB 36′). The latter system has the benefit of […]
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Georeferenced UK statistical data typically comes in one of two spatial coordinate reference systems – either latitude/longitude points based on the World Geodetic System 1984 (‘WGS 84′), or in the eastings/northings system of the British National Grid (based on the 1936 Ordnance Survey Great Britain datum ‘OSGB 36′). The latter system has the benefit of […]
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It’s always irked me slightly that many online maps of London show the various tube services as straight lines between stations, or as idealised Bezier curves. Perhaps the regimented lines and angles of the official “Beck-style” tube diagram has meant that, when translating into a “real life” geographical map, people have tended to keep the […]
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It’s always irked me slightly that many online maps of London show the various tube services as straight lines between stations, or as idealised Bezier curves. Perhaps the regimented lines and angles of the official “Beck-style” tube diagram has meant that, when translating into a “real life” geographical map, people have tended to keep the […]
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UbiSoft have created this compelling live map of London […]
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I have had an interest in volunteered geographic information (VGI) for quite some time (see my publications or blog posts) but only recently have I had an opportunity to look at the spatial error of features within VGI. To this end, our paper enti…
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I have had an interest in volunteered geographic information (VGI) for quite some time (see my publications or blog posts) but only recently have I had an opportunity to look at the spatial error of features within VGI. To this end, our paper enti…
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Google have been reworking their Maps, currently available by request to review in beta. The other day Ollie O’Brief blogged with a breakdown of the pros and cons of the new design, arguing it represents a visual improvement but functional regression. Here I’ve thrown a few screenshots together to illustrate the comparisons at different scales […]
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Google have been reworking their Maps, currently available by request to review in beta. The other day Ollie O’Brief blogged with a breakdown of the pros and cons of the new design, arguing it represents a visual improvement but functional regression. Here I’ve thrown a few screenshots together to illustrate the comparisons at different scales […]
Continue reading »or “How to use RGL to plot 3d maps of API map tiles” OK more nerd than ninja. RGL is R’s box of power-tool for 3D object rendering, with functionality for creating 3d mesh objects and curved surfaces, and for using materials and directional lighting. For example the line: plot3d(rnorm(100),rnorm(100),rnorm(100)) creates a 3d scatterplot of […]
Continue reading »or “How to use RGL to plot 3d maps of API map tiles” OK more nerd than ninja. RGL is R’s box of power-tool for 3D object rendering, with functionality for creating 3d mesh objects and curved surfaces, and for using materials and directional lighting. For example the line: plot3d(rnorm(100),rnorm(100),rnorm(100)) creates a 3d scatterplot of […]
Continue reading »The Consumers’ Association Which? magazine is probably not the first place to turn to when you look for usability studies. Especially not if you’re interested in computer technology – for that, there are sources such as PC Magazine on the consumer side, and professional magazines such as Interactions from Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human […]
The Spatial Data Infrastructure Magazine (SDIMag.com) is a relatively new e-zine dedicated to the development of spatial data infrastructures around the world. Roger Longhorn, the editor of the magazine, conducted an email interview with me, which is now published. In the interview, we are covering the problematic terminology used to describe a wider range of activities; the […]
Here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, we have just made live our latest in a series of services examining live data feeds – CityDashBoard. The system pulls in data from a variety feeds, de…
Continue reading »At the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, I presented during the session ‘Information Geographies: Online Power, Representation and Voice’, which was organised by Mark Graham (Oxford Internet Institute) and Matthew Zook (University of Kentucky). For an early morning session on a Saturday, the session was well attended – and the papers […]
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 »…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 »GEMMA is the project I’ve been working on for the last six months, it’s one of the JISCgeo projects and it is now released – although consider it to be beta as there are lots of bugs and UI quirks … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The organisers of next year’s Olympic Games in London, LOCOG, have unveiled their map of the 1000+ places that the Olympic Torch Relay will pass through. The data that the map is built from is readily accessible (as a JSON … Continue reading →
Continue reading »…when they were plotting this road in East London for Google Maps:
A quick look at the Google Maps aerial imagery confirms there’s something odd about that road kink:
Never fear, OSM is here:
Continue reading »As part of the Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) workshop that was held in Seattle in April 2011, Daniel Sui, Sarah Elwood and Mike Goodchild announced that they will be editing a volume dedicated to the topic, planned to be published at the beginning of next year. My contribution to this volume focuses on citizen science, […]
So – I was at the State of the Map EU (SotM) conference in Vienna last weekend – a European-focused conference on the OpenStreetMap project. I travelled with my colleague Steven Gray and presented some screenshots from the GEMMA project … Continue reading →
Continue reading »At the State of the Map (EU) 2011 conference that was held in Vienna from 15-17 July, I gave a keynote talk on the relationships between the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community and the GIScience research community. Of course, the relationships are especially important for those researchers who are working on volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), due to […]
In March 2008, I started comparing OpenStreetMap in England to the Ordnance Survey Meridian 2, as a way to evaluate the completeness of OpenStreetMap coverage. The rational behind the comparison is that Meridian 2 represents a generalised geographic dataset that is widely use in national scale spatial analysis. At the time that the study started, […]
Dr Muki Haklay,UCL CEGE, has been carrying out some quantitative research into OpenStreetMap’s coverage in the UK, comparing road lengths in each square kilometre, with those in a definitive national dataset, Ordnance Survey Meridian 2. He’s updated his findings every … Continue reading →
Continue reading »This post reviews the two books about OpenStreetMap that appeared late in 2010: OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World (by F. Ramm, J. Topf & S. Chilton, 386 pages, £25) and OpenStreetMap: Be your own Cartographer (by J. Bennett, 252 pages, £25). The review was written by Thomas Koukoletsos, with some […]
ITO‘s OSM Analysis table is updated daily, showing the number of roads in each district/borough in the UK that are in the OS Locator* dataset that are missing in OpenStreetMap. There is an accompanying choropleth map (you need to login … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Following successful funding for the European Union FP7 EveryAware and the EPSRC Extreme Citizen Science activities, the department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at UCL is inviting applications for a postdoctoral position and 3 PhD studentships. Please note that these positions are open to students from any EU country. These positions are in the […]
OpenStreetMap, the free wiki world map, is starting to come of age. The project is now six years old, and is gradually becoming noticed in wider circles, with AOL and Mapquest producing their own versions of the map, support from … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Dr Martin Austwick and I have produced an updated version of the animation of Barclays Cycle Hire bikes on a typical weekday: Martin has once again done some programming magic to show the River Thames, Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens and Regent’s … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The paper “How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map An Area Well? The validity of Linus’ law to Volunteered Geographic Information“ has appeared in The Cartographic Journal. The proper citation for the paper is: Haklay, M and Basiouka, S and Antoniou, V and Ather, A (2010) How Many Volunteers Does It Take To Map […]
EveryAware is a three-year research project, funded under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The project’s focus is on the development of Citizen Science techniques to allow people to find out about their local environmental conditions, and then to see if the provision of this information leads to behaviour change. The abstract of the […]
The website GPS Business News published an interview with me in which I covered several aspects of OpenStreetMap and crowdsourced geographical information, including aspects of spatial data quality, patterns of data collection, inequality in coverage a…
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