Monthly Archives: December 2009

Season’s Greetings

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2010 promises to be a very exciting year for GIS, neo-geography and information visualisation.

Potentially one of the most interesting events that may happen next year is a big shift on access to mapping data in the UK. Yesterday, the Communities and Local Government Department (CLG) published the consultation paper for opening up Ordnance Survey data. The consultation is open until March.

Also in March is the first Wherecamp EU, right here in London. I’ve looked on enviously as the neo-geos and proto-geos do cool things with spatial data over in the States at Wherecamp, and its associated “regular” conference Where 2.0. Now we get to do the same!

Geomob’s next evening, at my alma mater City University in January, has an interesting lineup of speakers, possibly including the author of Information is Beautiful – the UK edition of which is out shortly after in February.

This year was pretty amazing for opening up access to data – there’s a lot of it out there, now we just need to visualise it. Here are some lovely examples.

Finally, the British Library is putting on a major exhibition of historic maps from April – Magnificant Maps, which will include the largest book in the world – six feet high apparently. I saw their “London: A Life in Maps” exhibition back in 2007 and was highly impressed. They have an impressive collection and I look forward to seeing next year’s exhibition.

Season’s greetings!


Bauble from the OpenStreetMap Wiki

On-The-Fly Mapping Preview

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A public preview of the on-the-fly mapping that is being used for the CensusGIV project is available at OpenOrienteeringMap (OOM).

The same mechanism that will be used to produce the varied choropleth maps of census data is being used to produce the “Street-O” and “Pseud-O” maps on OOM. The main differences are that the map image files, or tiles, are more aggressively cached – as there’s only two maps rather than millions – and the designs are in an XML file rather than being specified on the URL, as they are much more complex than simple thematic choropleth maps.

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Further details of the construction are in a posting and information page on my personal blog.

Top: “Pseud-O” map of Furzton district in Milton Keynes. Bottom: Edinburgh Old Town “Street-O” map.

CensusGIV Prototype Presentation for CASA

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My boss (Dr Pablo Mateos) and I gave this presentation today as part of this term’s CASA Seminar series here at UCL. My bit starts at slide 22 (of 60! – we just about managed it in the hour but only by rushing at the end.)

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CensusGIV – Geographic Information Visualisation of Census Data

View more documents from oliverobrien.

Note that the censusprofiler site mentioned a couple of times in the presentation only has a (very out of date) blog on it at the moment, and the prototype itself is not yet available for general use – with luck, an alpha version will be available to play with by the end of the year.