The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
If I said a country was 1594719800 metres squared it would mean a lot less to you than if I said it was about the size of Greater London (so long as you know about how big Greater London is). For this reason the media tend to report the extent of a flood in …
Continue reading »I have been using R (a free statistics and graphics software package) now for the past four years or so and I have seen it become an increasingly powerful method of both analysing and visualising spatial data. Crucially, more and more people are writing accessible tutorials (see here) for beginners and intermediate users and the development …
Continue reading »One of the objectives of the COSMIC project is to “extend our current techniques of visualising complex spatial systems… [to] enable a wide range of stakeholders to be involved both in understanding such complexity and using it in policy analysis.” Normally, …
Continue reading »I have spent the last few years investigating the geography of family names (also called surnames). I work with the team who assembled the UCL Department of Geography Worldnames Database that contains the names and geographic locations of over 300 million people in nearly 30 countries (a few of these are yet to be added to the website). My research has …
Continue reading »… is the biggest, fattest book I have ever contributed to, almost unknowingly. Imagine my surprise when the large parcel, almost too heavy for the postman to carry, arrived on my desk, containing a copy of the 1465 page Technical …
Continue reading »Last week I attended a “Beyond 2011” Census event organised by the Prof. Dave Martin and the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The attendees came from central and local government, private companies that utlise census data, and a few universities. The majority there (based on an approximate straw poll) believed that there would not be a …
Continue reading »“Treemaps display hierarchical (tree-structured) data as a set of nested rectangles. Each branch of the tree is given a rectangle, which is then tiled with smaller rectangles representing sub-branches. A leaf node’s rectangle has an area proportional to a specified dimension on the data. Often the leaf nodes are colored to show a separate dimension of …
Continue reading »Overview Recently we have been developing a Java based set of software components for the field of land use transportation modeling. The system has being designed for integrating various open source tools for the rapid assessment of urban futures. We …
Continue reading »MOGRIDGE M. and PARR J. B. (1997) Metropolis or region: on the development and structure of London, Regional Studies 31, 97–115. Drawing on a disparate range of sources and viewing the question from several perspectives, an attempt is made to trace …
Continue reading »WEGENER, M. and GNAD, F. and VANNAHME, M. (1986) The Time Scale of Urban Change, Advances in Urban Systems Modelling(Hutchison, B. and Batty, M. eds.) Human settlements evolve over a long time span by the cumulative efforts of many generations. The …
Continue reading »TITHERIDGE, H. and HALL, P. (2006) Changing travel to work patterns in South East England, Journal of Transport Geography14, 60–75. The Greater South East England region of the UK constitutes a “global mega-city region”. The UK Government’s 2003 Sustainable Communities strategy …
Continue reading »NIELSEN, T.A.S. and HOVGESEN, H.H. (2008) Exploratory mapping of commuter flows in England and Wales, Journal of Transport Geography 16, 90–99 The paper uses the origin–destination commute data published from the 1991 and 2001 Census to explore the developments in …
Continue reading »ZHAO, F. and CHUNG, S. (2006) A Study of Alternative Land Use Forecasting Models, Final Report to the Florida DOT Systems Planning Office FSUTMS requires future land use forecasts as input data to predict future travel demand and transportation needs. …
Continue reading »Flattening the Earth so that it can be easily drawn on a 2-dimensional surface is complicated. Over many years map projections have been developed to aid in this process, but they can only really estimate (albeit very accurately) the shape and dimensions of things on the Earth’s round surface. Whilst it is important to understand …
Continue reading »Following my previous post I have been digging around archive.org for interesting spatial/ geographical related resources. A search for “geographic” yielded a number of back issues of the National Geographic Magazine. They date back as far as 1888 and contain some great images and maps. There are some real gems to be had, such as …
Continue reading »I hadn’t seen this video before. It demonstrates one of the earliest attempts at automated cartography for the display of time with spatial data. Truly ground breaking, the video shows the urban growth of Lansing at 5 yearly intervals from between 1850 and 1965 and was produced by Allan Schmidt at the Michigan State University Urban …
Continue reading »Buried deep in the ESRI (UK) website is a case study I helped put together showcasing some of the ways we use GIS (specifically ESRI products) within UCL Department of Geography and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. ESRI (UK) co-sponsor my PhD research and I have had a very positive and productive relationship with the company. I …
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