Ollie at CASA has used the feature to map the occurrences of the “High Street” road name – and a few regional variations, namely Main Street, Front Street, Market Street, Fore Street and The Street. Using GEMMA, and the high level of completion of OpenStreetMap in the UK and Ireland, allows us to visually show the spatial patterns of such street names:

As Ollie states, it turns out that Main Street is popular in the Midlands and in Scotland and Ireland, and Front Street is popular in the North-East of England (around Newcastle) while High Street is used nearly everywhere in the UK – but only sparingly in Ireland. Market Street is popular in the Manchester and Devon areas. Fore Street is popular in Cornwall and The Street very popular in Essex and Kent.

GEMMA is in early beta, aimed at allowing anyone to create a map via its online interface and iPhone app, you can find out more and try it out via the GEMMA blog. We also provide a unique map url shortener, so you can share your maps with ease – the map above can be viewed live at http://gemma.casa.ucl.ac.uk/apps/canvas/?m=7tj

Thanks go to Ollie over at http://oliverobrien.co.uk/ for creating the map, let us know if you create a GEMMA map….

Ollie at CASA has used the feature to map the occurrences of the “High Street” road name – and a few regional variations, namely Main Street, Front Street, Market Street, Fore Street and The Street. Using GEMMA, and the high level of completion of OpenStreetMap in the UK and Ireland, allows us to visually show the spatial patterns of such street names:

As Ollie states, it turns out that Main Street is popular in the Midlands and in Scotland and Ireland, and Front Street is popular in the North-East of England (around Newcastle) while High Street is used nearly everywhere in the UK – but only sparingly in Ireland. Market Street is popular in the Manchester and Devon areas. Fore Street is popular in Cornwall and The Street very popular in Essex and Kent.

GEMMA is in early beta, aimed at allowing anyone to create a map via its online interface and iPhone app, you can find out more and try it out via the GEMMA blog. We also provide a unique map url shortener, so you can share your maps with ease – the map above can be viewed live at http://gemma.casa.ucl.ac.uk/apps/canvas/?m=7tj

Thanks go to Ollie over at http://oliverobrien.co.uk/ for creating the map, let us know if you create a GEMMA map….

We are experiencing a massive explosion of online geospatial data from many new and unconventional sources from mobile devices to crowd-sourcing tools. Combined with newly released public sector information, we desperately need to integrate our tools for unlocking, exploiting, understanding and sharing these new data sets so that users can be provided with an accessible gateway to their display, mapping and spatial analysis.  Funded by JISC, GEMMA aims to produce a single workflow for the collection, mapping, preservation, sharing and visualisation of the geospatial datasets.

What does that mean in short? The ability to create a map without knowing anything about mapping. Simple as, for too long creating a map has been too complicated, there is now a vast amount of geographically tagged information available online, yet to map it you still have to have a considerable amount of computer related knowledge. Not any more, and we are not talking standard pin type maps, we will enable complex spatial mapping to be carried out at the click of mouse and a point at a file.

With applications as wide ranging as community participation, social simulation, economic analysis, urban modelling and beyond, the collection, visualisation, analysis and ultimately understanding of these datasets requires new software organised around a new series of workflows which integrate an array of tools.

Over the next 8 months we aim to produce a one stop shop for any user who wishes to take public sector, crowd-sourced, mobile and related online data with geospatial reference which enables them to display and overlay this information in non-proprietary or freely available mapping services on the web such as Google Maps or Open Street Map, building on several tools that CASA has developed such as, MapTube and SurveyMapper.

In typical CASA style, we will have frequent updates, beta releases and online apps. GEMMA will be integrated with various crowd sourced and open data sources complete with both iPhone and Android applications for viewing and collecting data in the field.

GEMMA kicks off March 1st, 2011, its time to make geo easy….