London Twitter Data as a Landscape

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Readers will know that as part of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, here in CASA at, we are exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. As part of the course we are looking at collecting data from the Twitter API and using the resulting .csv file as an input into a variety of software, including Processing and ArcMap. Data so far has been focused on displaying the output from ArcGIS as a slightly more traditional map, albeit in 3D via Lumion:

Taking a step back it is possible to take a more abstract view of the data visualisation and use the Twitter data collected to create a digital elevation model for direct landscape visualisations.

As we have mentioned in previous posts there are of course many arguments on the pro's and con's of visualising data in such a way, indeed the visualisation is developed to open up the debate as part of the MRes course allowing various visualisation techniques to be compared from the same data set. 


Sometimes however an abstract route to visualising data can quite liberating in a world of visualisation dominated by more traditional and academic output, the screenshot above illustrates Kingston Peak with Soho Mountain dominating the background. The movie below details the landscape as a fly-through:





In future posts we will explore issues of scale as we take the landscape and move it into an online exhibition space....

When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution

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As Editor of Future Internet i am pleased to announce that Nathan Jurgenson of the University of Maryland has just published a new paper entitled 'When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution': 

The rise of mobile phones and social media may come to be historically coupled with a growing atmosphere of dissent that is enveloping much of the globe. The Arab Spring, UK Riots, Occupy and many other protests and so-called “flash-mobs” are all massive gatherings of digitally-connected individuals in physical space; and they have recently become the new normal. The primary role of technology in producing this atmosphere has, in part, been to effectively link the on and the offline. 


The trend to view these as separate spaces, what I call “digital dualism”, is faulty. Instead, I argue that the digital and physical enmesh to form an “augmented reality”. Linking the power of the digital–creating and disseminating networked information–with the power of the physical–occupying geographic space with flesh-and-blood bodies–is an important part of why we have this current flammable atmosphere of augmented revolution.


The full paper can be read over at Future Internet

London's Twitter Island - From ArcGIS to Max to Lumion

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As part of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, here in CASA at The Bartlett, University College London, we are exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. As part of the course we are looking at collecting data from the Twitter API and using the resulting .csv file as an input into a variety of software, including Processing and ArcMap.

One such known example is the London Twitter map by UrbanTick, developed using the data collector created by Steven Gray and imported by Fabian into ArcMap, it developed a style of its own as the 'NewCity Landscape' collection. From a digital urban point of view the next stage of the map is a 3D extension, a transformation that proved surprisingly difficult due to the nature of combining the worlds of traditional GIS and game engines such as Lumion.

We are still in the early stages of development but the movie below illustrates the NewCity Landscape Map of London visualisation in Lumion as a 'Twitter Island':



Music by Pigeman over at MP3 Unsigned. There are of course many arguments on the pro's and con's of visualising data in such a way, indeed the visualisation is developed to open up the debate as part of the MRes course allowing various visualisation techniques to be compared from the same data set.

We will have more updates as the visualisation develops, along with a walk through of how to build it. If your interested in such output our MRes is now open for applications, entry 2012-2013...

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We are pleased to note another new paper in Future Internet Journal as part of the special issue on on NeoGeography and WikiPlanning:

The Street Network Evolution of Crowdsourced Maps: OpenStreetMap in Germany 2007–2011

Pascal Neis ^1,* , Dennis Zielstra ²  and Alexander Zipf ¹ 

¹ Geoinformatics Research Group, Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg, Berliner Street 48, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany² Geomatics Program, University of Florida, 3205 College Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33314, USA

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project is a prime example in the field of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Worldwide, several hundred thousand people are currently contributing information to the “free” geodatabase. However, the data contributions show a geographically heterogeneous pattern around the globe. Germany counts as one of the most active countries in OSM; thus, the German street network has undergone an extensive development in recent years. The question that remains is this: How does the street network perform in a relative comparison with a commercial dataset? By means of a variety of studies, we show that the difference between the OSM street network for car navigation in Germany and a comparable proprietary dataset was only 9% in June 2011. 


The results of our analysis regarding the entire street network showed that OSM even exceeds the information provided by the proprietary dataset by 27%. Further analyses show on what scale errors can be reckoned with in the topology of the street network, and the completeness of turn restrictions and street name information. In addition to the analyses conducted over the past few years, projections have additionally been made about the point in time by which the OSM dataset for Germany can be considered “complete” in relative comparison to a commercial dataset.


You can download the full paper direct from the Future Internet Journal site.

All at Sea - Google 3D Warehouse and Lumion

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Lumion is a 3D engine for rapid visualisation, it allows models to be quickly imported and integrated within more complex scenes. 

One of its strong points is support for the COLLADA  - COLLAborative Design Activity file format for interactive 3D applications file format, allowing models to be easily exported from Google SketchUp. As a quick test of its capabilities we headed over to the Google 3D Warehouse and downloaded three models of iconic London buildings. By simply importing into SketchUp and then exporting in .dae (COLLADA) we were able to create the following movie:

The clip was created with the free version of Lumion, it really has never been easier to create rapid visualisations, the next step is to import various other data sources to create a more informative output.

Landscape and the Internet - 9 Papers in Future Internet Special Issue

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We are pleased to announce a special issue of  Future Internet, Volume 3, Issue 4 (December 2011).  Focussed on Landscape and the Internet and edited by Dr. Christopher Pettit Principal Research Scientist and Research Manager, Spatial Information Sciences, Department of Primary Industries Victoria, Australia and Dr. Arzu Coltekin,Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 80750 Zürich, Switzerland, the issue represents a series of notable papers:

Table of Contents:

Olaf Schroth, Ellen Pond, Cam Campbell, Petr Cizek, Stephen Bohus and Stephen R. J. SheppardArticle: Tool or Toy? Virtual Globes in Landscape Planning Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 204-227; doi:10.3390/fi3040204
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/204/



Philip Paar and Jörg RekittkeArticle: Low-Cost Mapping and Publishing Methods for Landscape Architectural Analysis and Design in Slum-Upgrading Projects Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 228-247; doi:10.3390/fi3040228
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/228/



Mark Imhof, Matthew Cox, Angela Fadersen, Wayne Harvey, Sonia Thompson, David Rees and Christopher PettitArticle: Natural Resource Knowledge and Information Management via the Victorian Resources Online Website Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 248-280; doi:10.3390/fi3040248
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/248/



David Parsons, Ramesh Lal and Manfred Lange
Article: Test Driven Development: Advancing Knowledge by Conjecture and Confirmation
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 281-297; doi:10.3390/fi3040281
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/281/



Haifeng Li and Bo WuArticle: A Service-Oriented Architecture for Proactive Geospatial Information Services
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 298-318; doi:10.3390/fi3040298
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/298/



Subhash Sharma, Christopher Pettit, Ian Bishop, Pang Chan and Falak ShethArticle: An Online Landscape Object Library to Support Interactive Landscape Planning
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 319-343; doi:10.3390/fi3040319
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/319/



Saviour Formosa, Vincent Magri, Julia Neuschmid and Manfred SchrenkArticle: Sharing Integrated Spatial and Thematic Data: The CRISOLA Case for Malta and the European Project Plan4all Process Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 344-361; doi:10.3390/fi3040344
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/344/



Sabrina Lai and Corrado ZoppiArticle: An Ontology of the Strategic Environmental Assessment of City Masterplans 
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 362-378; doi:10.3390/fi3040362
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/362/



Arzu Coltekin and Tumasch ReichenbacherReview: High Quality Geographic Services and Bandwidth Limitations
Future Internet 2011, 3(4), 379-396; doi:10.3390/fi3040379
http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/3/4/379/


Full details can be found over at the Future Internet Journal. 

All the London Datastore Maps

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Richard Milton here in CASA is working on our new National Centre for Research Methods funded TAILISMAN project. One aspect of the project is looking into data visualisation, here we present a guest post by Richard on the automatic visualisation of data from the London Datastore...

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 MapTube to handle, so I wrote a process to make the maps automatically. The results are one thumbnail map for every field in the first hundred datasets on the London Datastore. I stopped the process once I got to a hundred as it was taking a long time.

 A section of the results are shown below:

You can view the zoomable version via the full 10,000 pixel image created using the Image Cutter.

The name of the dataset and name of the column being visualised are shown in the top left of the map, while the colour scale is a Jenks 5 class range between the min and max of the data. This sort of works, but raises more questions than it answers about the data. To start with, one interesting thing that jumps out of the data is that there was a step change in London population around 1939, from the “London Borough Historic Population” dataset.

The first problem with this is that there is no structure to how the thumbnail maps are placed on the image. The idea is to use a data classifier and group maps according to how similar they are, so distance would be proportional to similarity. This work is still in progress.

The next problem is with the colour scales, as it commits the cardinal sin of not showing one. The maps are supposed to be representative, so all use the green Jenks 5 classes, but it’s obvious that this has gone wrong on most of the maps. The reason for this is that the London Datastore include data in the CSV files at different geographic scales. Most of the maps show London at Borough level, but also contain data for England, Scotland and Wales which mess up the automatic colour scale. The top range ends up being the larger geographic areas which you can’t see, so the maps end up with just four classes on them. On some of the maps you can see the Government Office Regions (Midlands, Wales, South East etc), along with Borough level data for London.

A map showing data at different geographic scales. London has data at Borough level while the rest of the country is at GOR level.

The final problem, which also relates to different geographic scales, is to do with almost all the maps visualising either a count of people or events. Most maps are a population of some kind, so displaying population density rather than count would make a lot more sense.

As a proof of concept, this demonstrates that we can handle the maps automatically from an Internet data store. One thing that’s obvious from looking at the zoomable map view is that you need the ability to click on one of the thumbnails and go straight through to the full size map with all the information about what is it. There is also no search facility so you can’t find anything, but the next proof of concept is where things will start to get interesting....

We will be following progress and the forthcoming TALISMAN project blog with more results in the new year.

The Sky Scratcher - Architecture for Cats on Kickstarter needs your help

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The Sky Scratcher is a kickstarter project which at the time of writing has 38 hours to go - in short there is still time to back it.

If we had a cat here at digitalurban it would without doubt be the Sky Scratcher - a revolutionary, architectural spin on the cat scratching post.  Built from more than 125 corrugated cardboard die-cut pads, a bamboo plywood base and center pole, the goal is to use Eco-friendly materials that are both safe for your cats and aesthetically pleasing to the human eye. 


Set up my Mike Estes, his love for all things creative drove him to reinvent the cat scratching post with The Sky Scratcher. Mike states that not only will your feline friends enjoy scratching to their hearts content, you will also enjoy a high quality piece of art that will add a stylish accent to any room in your home or office...



We would love to see this enter production, head over to the Sky Scratcher page on KickStater to give them your backing...