• Visual Wind Rose – to show the average wind direction;
• Wind Run – an odometer style view of the total distance the wind has travelled in the last 24 hours;
• UV Index, showing the current UV level for London.

The page is optimised for a tablet/mobile view – View the live London Weather Dials.

The post Updated Live Weather Data From London appeared first on Digital Urban.

With the cities of Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh,  Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle included, it is London with the largets amount of live feeds at the moment. As Duncan Geere noted in the write up of CityDashboard in Wired –  the dashboard for the city pulls in TfL data, RSS feeds from BBC London news, geographical information from OpenStreetMap, weather data from Google, trends from Twitter, traffic cameras and water levels along the Thames. It also includes data from UCL’s radiation detector.


Each section has a countdown to the next update with the weather from the Davis Vantage Pro 2 on the roof of CASA updating every 2 seconds, radiation every 5 seconds etc…


Based on a concept developed by Oliver O’Brien, Andrew Hudson-Smith and Richard Milton, here in CASA, the design and planning was developed by Duncan Smith and Oliver O’Brien with website development ultimately led by Oliver. Take a look at Olivers site for development details.

The post Citydashboard.org: A Live View of City Data appeared first on Digital Urban.

The project is the latest innovation from Oxfam which promotes sustainability by encouraging people to look beyond disposable consumerism. The stories behind vintage and second-hand items are all part of their desirability. At the moment these stories can be lost when an item is acquired by a new owner but Oxfam Shelflife enables the stories to stay with the items in a more long-lasting way.

The post Oxfam Shelflife: Making Charity Shops Social Museums via the Internet of Things appeared first on Digital Urban.

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 post All the London Datastore Maps appeared first on Digital Urban.

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

The post Introducing GEMMA: A Geospatial Engine for Mass Mapping Applications appeared first on Digital Urban.

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.”

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:

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:

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.

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.”

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:

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:

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.