The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
Routes I created GPX route files for the challenge. These were created manually in QGIS, using the OpenStreetMap standard “Mapnik” render as a background, by drawing lines, with Google Street View imagery used to check restrictions. I split each team’s route into 12 stages (so 36 altogether), which were initially each just over 10km and […]
Continue reading »Routes I created GPX route files for the challenge. These were created manually in QGIS, using the OpenStreetMap standard “Mapnik” render as a background, by drawing lines, with Google Street View imagery used to check restrictions. I split each team’s route into 12 stages (so 36 altogether), which were initially each just over 10km and […]
Continue reading »Routes I created GPX route files for the challenge. These were created manually in QGIS, using the OpenStreetMap standard “Mapnik” render as a background, by drawing lines, with Google Street View imagery used to check restrictions. I split each team’s route into 12 stages (so 36 altogether), which were initially each just over 10km and […]
Continue reading »I was a guest earlier this week at HERE Techologies at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2019 in Las Vegas, the world’s biggest consumer electronics trade show. Their booth was directly right outside the main entrance to the Convention Centre, the hub of CES, right beside Google’s own huge one. The juxtaposition was interesting, the … Continue reading A Day with HERE at CES →
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Panama is a Central American country with around 4 million population. The country is split into 10 provinces (including one that was split from another in 2014). The population is obliged to register for and obtain an ID card, or “cedula” which contains an interesting attribute. The prefix of their ID number indicates their province … Continue reading Panama’s Population Geographies →
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So Big Data Here, a little pop-up exhibition of hyperlocal data, has just closed, having run continuously from Tuesday evening to this morning, as part of Big Data Week. We had many people peering through the windows of the characterful North Lodge building beside UCL’s main entrance on Gower Street, particularly during the evening rush … Continue reading Big Data Here: The Code →
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As a follow-up to my intro post about TubeHeartbeat, here’s some notes on the API usage that allowed me to get the digital cartography right, and build out the interactive visualisation I wanted to. The key technology behind the visualisation is the HERE JavaScript API. This not only displays the background HERE map tiles and … Continue reading Behind the Code in TubeHeartbeat →
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The London Railway Atlas is probably the most detailed […]
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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 →
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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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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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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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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The Diamond Geezer is, this month, climbing the highest tops in each one of London’s 33 boroughs. To find the highest points, he’s used a number of websites which list the places. These derive the data from contour lines, perhaps supplemented with GPS or other measurements. However, another interesting – and new – datasource for […]
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There’s a lot of ways you can define the centre of London. The Londonist had a good go last month, and CASA geographer Adam Dennett has a shot too, following an article in today’s Evening Standard newspaper. The former site of the Charing Cross, marked by a plaque in front of the Charles I statue […]
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Diamond Geezer escaped from London by plotting the shortest distance (as the crow flies) from his home to the London boundary, and then taking the shortest walking route that gets to that same point on the boundary. He identified a pub in Woodford Green as the closest point on the boundary from a nominal start […]
Continue reading »The blog is now at http://oobrien.com/. The old oliverobrien.co.uk domain will continue to work for a couple of weeks. My leisure blog has also moved and is now at http://blog.oomap.co.uk/. Why? I’m consolidating the number of domains I own, to make management easier.
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I was prompted by the excellent Twitter Tongues map, where geolocated tweets in London (including mine, and those from hundreds of thousands of others) were mined by Ed Manley over the summer, and then mapped by James Cheshire, to see … Continue reading →
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After Google abruptly turned off their XML weather feed this week, I’ve switched to using Yahoo! Weather (an RSS feed) for the CityDashboard weather forecast module. Yahoo uses WOEIDs rather than city names, which takes a bit longer to configure … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Here is the API documentation for CityDashboard. It’s really not a very advanced API, and it’s not delivered in a “proper” format (e.g. XML or JSON), instead it’s available as a number of CSV/TXT-formatted files. It ain’t pretty but it … Continue reading →
Continue reading »There is a surprisingly difficult task to solve with MySQL queries, which I’ve been spending some time trying to do – the Groupwise Maximum problem. This is the name for the type of query that I was trying, although in … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A rather techy post from me, just before the Final Project Post for GEMMA (my current project at CASA) is submitted, summing the project and applications up. Why? I wanted to share with you two rather specialist bits of GEMMA … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I’m currently using Munin to keep an eye on the various services running on my main server at UCL CASA. Munin is a monitoring package. It is simple to install (on Ubuntu, sudo apt-get install munin on your primary server, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I’ve recently reported a very large blog from Blogger to WordPress. The blog has been around for many years, with around a thousand posts – most of which contain at least one image embedded in. The WordPress theme to be … Continue reading →
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