Portfolio Archives - Digital Urban

GEMMA Early Beta

Andy — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:38:00 +0000

Finally we are nearing the end of the project (ok technically at the end but its both complex and exciting so we might squeeze in a few more days yet) we would like to introduce the world to GEMMA, the Geospatial Engine for Mass Mapping Applications.

GEMMA was designed to allow anyone to make complex map mashups with a minimum of geographic knowledge. So easy in fact that even the most modest of users will be able to quickly collect data and visualise it in a few clicks, no worrisome logins, data downloads or nasty terms and conditions . Hopefully, GEMMA will get everyone excited about making their own maps, from a map of all their local Tesco locations through to a map of the number of cars that pass by their house. Building maps online takes time and often basic programming knowledge. GEMMA solves this problem by integrating many of the popular CASA products, along with some new features and iPhone app, combined into one easy to use platform allowing you make an interactive map that can be shared with the world.

So what are GEMMA’s main features?

Basically it’s a structured mashing application. A little bit from MapTube, a little bit from Google MyMaps, a little bit of opening up the wealth of data from OpenStreetMap. Add your own measured data with the accompanying iPhone app that is super simple to use – choose what you want to count, start tapping the screen to count, and then upload. Back in the GEMMA website, login and add.

With GEMMA you can stand on street corners and easily measure the demographics of, for example,Boris Bike users, create a shiny PDF of the data, and stick it up on a wall or embed it into your homework. We provide a unqiue shortcode for sharing with the world, or GEMMA will remember it in a list for future access.

How would you use GEMMA?

If you’re a Geography student who needs to prepare some maps for your course work on local population groups, you may need to collect counts of people for various locations around your local town and compare that with the Output Area Classifications (OAC). What are you going to do? In the past you would have had to go and find an OAC map of your area and annotate it with the various bits of data you collect but you have left it to the last minute, again, and don’t know what to do! That’s where GEMMA steps in. Take a look at the video to see how easy using GEMMA actually is:

You can view the PDF created in the video here and take a preview look at GEMMA.

The iPhone Application will be available to download from the iTunes App Store and we will let you know in this blog when it’s available. The GEMMA website is still in the BETA stages and we are just cleaning up the interface to make it easier for you to use as soon as it’s ready you’ll be able to use the web app from this link.

So who built GEMMA?

A few of the people at CASA, namely Steven Gray, Ollie O’Brien our Principle Investigator Andy Hudson-Smith and finally Richard Milton who built some of the backend features that GEMMA requires to work so a big thank you to him. We will try and get a team photo together soon as we can.

As Ollie notes he has already blogged about the different APIs and libraries used. With any significant web project these days, good use of the rich tapestry of libraries out there is invaluable. Why write a polished Javascript-based UI from scratch when there is the powerful, beautiful and simple JQuery UI? Why spend ages creating sortable, resizable tables when JQuery Datatables will do that for you? Mapnik 2 has a whole host of new features, let’s use them. Let’s use authentication APIs from Twitter and Google rather than writing our own – the last thing people on the web need is yet another logon and password to remember (although, as Steve who did this part can attest, it’s not that easy – or smooth – for developers to take incorporate third-party identity management.) Let’s use custom-styled maps in the Google Maps API, and let Google take the strain of rendering them (it’s dead easy to create a grayscale layer for the Google Maps API).

If you sat Ollie down and asked the work he was most personally proud of, the answer would be GEMMAs PDF creation. During the project he has blogged about a couple of fairly cool things he has been able to do with WMS and SVG inputs for Mapnik and Cairo respectively, which looked to be a challenge. Steve on the other hand has been central to the GEMMA iPhone app, an app that allows anyone or any group to count anything, anywhere and have it mapped in realtime. From pedestrians and traffic through to flora and fauna, if it can be counted it can be mapped. The creation of a whole new mapping service with surveys, open data, custom markers and a bespoke iPhone app within a single interface has honestly been a challenge and one that has led to intense project meetings in the GEMMA lab.

Through it all we feel we have honestly come up with something unique, we hope you are as excited about GEMMA as we are and it doesn’t stop here. GEMMA has so far been a short, focused project. It’s tough to stop once you’ve started going – there’s so more we could do. We have more features to add to GEMMA in the pipeline so if you are interested in or have a feature that you would like to see in GEMMA then do get in contact.

Good news is that the developer team (Steve, Ollie and Richard) won ‘developers of 2011’ at the recent JISC GeoAwards. Personally I am very proud of the team, papers and further development coming soon…

Thanks as ever go to JISCGeo for allowing the creation of a Geographic Engine for Mass Mapping Applications.

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Introducing QRator – iPad and Web Based Living Labels for Museums

Andy — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:18:00 +0000

QRator is a collaborative project between the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), and UCL Museums and Collections, to develop new kinds of content, co-curated by the public, museum curators, and academic researchers, to enhance museum interpretation, community engagement and establish new connections to museum exhibit content.

The interactive system is designed to be non intrusive while enabling members of the pubic to simply type in their thoughts and interpretation of museum objects and click ‘send’. Their interpretation become part of the objects history and ultimately the display itself via the interactive label system to allow the display of comments and information directly next to the artefacts.

The project is powered by Tales of Things technology which has developed a method for cataloguing physical objects online and capture memories and stories via the Internet of Things. QRator takes the technology a step further bringing the opportunity to move the discussion of objects direct to the museum label and onto a digital collaborative interpretation label, users’ mobile phones, and online allowing the creation of a sustainable, world-leading model for two-way public interaction in museum spaces.

At its heart QRator is an iPad/iPhone and web based system that allows everyone to be a curator and share their views on an exhibition. Visitors can examine an object before leaving their thoughts via an iPad to create a digital, ‘living’ label that subsequent visitors can read and respond to.

By downloading a free application to an iPhone or android phone, visitors are able to see rolling updates to the digital label after they leave the museum, or via twitter. Participants are also able to take part in the conversation online via the QRator site with comments appearing live within the museum.

Content currently covers two museums at UCL; The Grant Museum of Zoology and The Petrie Museum of Egyptology. he Grant Museum of Zoology is one of the oldest natural history collections in England, dating back to 1827. The collection comprises over 68,000 skeletal, taxidermy and wet specimens, covering the whole of the animal kingdom. Many of the species are now endangered or extinct including the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine, the quagga and the dodo. The Grant Museum is the only remaining university zoology museum in London.

The Museum will offer a continual programme of ‘Current Questions’ for visitors to engage in. UCL is taking the opportunity to rethink what a university museum can be; a place not simply for a passive experience but for conversation – a cultural laboratory for the meeting of minds. Positioning the Museum as a place of experimentation, dialogue and debate.

You can join the conversation by visiting either the Petrie or Grant Museum or by simply heading over to http://www.qrator.org all comments appear live on the iPad screens in the Museum and on Tales of Things.

The post Introducing QRator – iPad and Web Based Living Labels for Museums appeared first on Digital Urban.

Spark of Genius Series: TalesofThings QR Codes and Life Logging

Andy — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:07:00 +0000

We are proud to of just been featured on Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Below we give full details of TalesofThings, how you can start ‘life logging’ your stuff and how you can tag architecture and make buildings tweet.

Quick Pitch: Adding memories and stories to objects and places via the Internet of Things and read/write QR codes.
Genius Idea: The Internet of Things is a growing trend; the term defines the idea of objects that are tagged, web-connected and endowed with the ability to relay data. This startup is all about the Internet of Things; in fact, it helps ordinary people add objects to the Internet of Things with just a few simple tools, such as a smartphone and a printer.
Tales of Things has developed read/write QR codes that helps preserve memories that people have attached to objects or places. Once an object is labeled with a scannable QR code, its movements can be tracked, as well as any subsequent stories. Each object has the ability to tweet when its memories are scanned, as well.
All the user has to do is photograph the object or place to be tagged, write a few words or upload a video about it, print out a site-generated QR code and affix the code to the item or at the place. From that point forward, the place or thing can be tracked through TalesofThings.com.Think of the site as an “antique roadshow of the future.”

Every object in existence can be tagged with any media, linked to tell a story, to recount its memories in a read/write environment and tweet when its interacted with.
Its a concept that takes a bit of time to take in, for example a wall in Camden Town, London, tweeted me last week when someone replayed its memories of having a Banksy painted on it. That wall is part of the Internet of Things via our free printed qrcodes.
The best part is, its incredibly easy to add objects. You simply sign up at talesofthings.com and then take click on ‘add a thing’. This takes you to a form where you give your object a name, for a example ‘Andy’s Mug’ or ‘BBC Broadcasting House’ are some of things we have added so far. You then type in a short story, or tale, linked to that object and upload a photograph to the site.

Everything has a location so we are creating a ‘Geography of Everything’, a brave claim perhaps but one that develops a new a new kind of geography, the geography of things. Simply click on the map to set a location, your object will now become part of the ‘World of Things‘ map.

Thats it, your object will now become part of the Internet of Things and will be able to tweet, have new stories/tales added as its passed on, sold or interacted with. It is all part of a Social Web of Things or SWOT as its known.

Each thing created gets assigned a unique ‘qrcode’ which can be attached to your object. For example, we have attached a qrcode to our office here in CASA which visitors scan using our free iPhone app. This ‘virtual guest book’ allows our office to recall the story of CASA and the people that pass through our doors. You can print out your codes via the site and attach them to anything.

Any media can be added to you object, the clip below provides a glimpse of the system running via our recent link up with Oxfam via Future Everything, complete with the iPhone RFID reader:

We have recently pushed an update that introduces ‘groups’ so all objects of interest can be viewed in one place. As all things urban are close to our heart, one of the first groups is ‘Architecture’ and we would like you to add your own building with a story.

Its simple to do, just sign up, upload a image of your building of choice (under 2mb) and add a story. Your building will then go live and your be able to add it to the architecture group. If you want you can also print out a QRCode that you can stick to the building allowing anyone to scan the code and add to the story/history of the building via the free iPhone/Android apps.
Your building will also be able to ‘Tweet’ everytime it is scanned or a new comment/story added, it will also become part of the ‘World of Things’ map – a place to view all the objects added so far to the site.

We are working on ways to make the objects more location aware and aware of near by objects, it could be interesting over the next few months to see how this develops. We look forward to seeing some of your buildings on the site and will sort out some sort of prize for the best stories…
Finally TalesofThings.com allows any object to be given its own webpage and ability to tweet, i.e. it allows any ‘thing’ to become connected. As such we have built an ‘Arduino Thing’ that welcomes all new objects joining the Internet of Things with a ‘Hi’ in Morse Code – the movie below reveals all:

Every time anyone adds an object to talesofthings our unit starts its morse code welcome, in a small way its a step towards things talking to things. Sure its not Skynet, an artificially intelligent system which became self-aware and revolted against its creators but we are working on our own protocols behind the scenes to take this further so all the objects are aware of the other objects.

You can start tagging anything and everything via talesofthings.com

The post Spark of Genius Series: TalesofThings QR Codes and Life Logging appeared first on Digital Urban.

Spark of Genius Series: TalesofThings QR Codes and Life Logging

Andy — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:07:00 +0000

Any media can be added to you object, the clip below provides a glimpse of the system running via our recent link up with Oxfam via Future Everything, complete with the iPhone RFID reader:

You can start tagging anything and everything via talesofthings.com

The post Spark of Genius Series: TalesofThings QR Codes and Life Logging appeared first on Digital Urban.

Introducing SurveyMapper: Beta is Now Live

Andy — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:47:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that the beta release of SurveyMapper, a free real-time geographic survey and polling tool from the nice people at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, is now live…

Do you want to know what peoples views are on the issue of the day, do you want to ask peoples views on a new product, perhaps you are carrying out a straw poll or do you want to collect data to input into a scientific model? All you need is SurveyMapper.com.

If you have used other ‘polling sites’ then you will be up to speed, except we have taken away the restrictions and added real-time mapping into the mix. Simply sign up (its free) and then your be able to create your own survey and embed it into your own site. Currently we have five levels of survey available – Worldwide, based on countries, European Countries US Zip Code, UK Postcode and a Drag and Drop Pin Map.

You can ask anything, survey the nation, the world or just your street with real-time mapping and statistics.

To take part or create your own survey head over to SurveyMapper.com
Keep up with the SurveyMapper twitter feed for news on the beta release, new features such as blog embedding and integration with our now infamous Tweet-o-Meter and New Cityscapes via Twitter Maps.
You can of course also follow us direct on Twitter @digitalurban.

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