Category Archives: Conferences

UCL – The Story so Far

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At the beginning of the July, I transferred from UCL Geography “proper” to CASA (the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis), a research group at UCL allied to Geography department and a number of other areas. I am initially working on the MapTube product, specifically enhancing its coverage with respect to the spatial datasets available in the UK Data Store and London Data Store.

As part of my induction, I was asked to present a summary of my work at UCL so far. Here are the slides for that presentation.

View more presentations from oliverobrien.

The presentation includes various screenshots of mapping data, including data from the OpenStreetMap, EDINA UKBORDERS and OS Open Data projects. Attributions can be found on the respective websites.

GISRUK Navigation Challenge

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This is the map GISRUK 2010 attendees are using to get from UCL, where the conference is, to the River Thames, where the boat await for the evening cruise. On the way, some of them are doing the challenge, which is to take the optimum route to visit any 6 of the 12 control points – a blue plaque at each one to prove their visit. The map was made using the OpenOrienteeringMap map builder.

[Download PDF]

(Note: The start point was actually from just east of “B” rather than the triangle.)

I haven’t yet computed the best route, I think it’s probably BAJFED or maybe BMCKED. There is no “trick” best route, as the points were fairly fixed by the locations of the blue plaques. But the solution is apparently not immediately obvious to the human eye.

Wherecamp EU – Day 2

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Today was the second day of Wherecamp EU, at the very swish Guardian offices in King’s Cross. More interesting talks, I mainly went to the OSM-themed ones this time, although I also spent a very interesting hour watching a simple iPhone map application being created from scratch. RichardF’s Potlatch 2 intro talk was probably my favourite of the day.

I also finally got around to giving my talk, a short description of orienteering and OpenOrienteeringMap. Highlight for me today though, perhaps because I did a 5K race this morning and then arrived at the conference too late for breakfast, was the excellent lunch, street-food wraps from Moolis – yum! Sponsors and unconferences rule.

Wherecamp EU – Day 1

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The first day of Wherecamp EU – a geo “unconference” – was today in London. Not having been to an unconference before, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but actually everything went pretty smoothly thanks to the efforts of the organisers. After a introduction session, talks (some lecture-style, some brainstorms/Q&As) were in six parallel streams, in strictly half-hour slots. People were given post-it notes and encouraged to stick on the “unconference wall” a topic that they would then talk about at the corresponding place and time:

The wall for today pretty much got filled, and there’s 15 up already for the final day, tomorrow, which is in the Guardian’s offices.

I generally enjoyed the talks I picked – particularly a talk by the ESRI UK CTO on the need to rethink how metadata in GIS is managed, especially in relation to delivering it through to mashups, to increase confidence in the final presented data. My favourite though was, without a doubt, a look at the ITO visualisations of OpenStreetMap and UK public transport datasets. The datasets are interesting on their own, but the polish on the visualisations are outstanding. For example, streams of sci-fi-style pulses representing the 24-hour flow of the UK long-distance coach network.

Tonight is “geo-beers” in King’s Cross, paid for by a sponsor – the entire conference is free, with free food and drink, thanks to the many sponsors of the event. Very impressed so far. Even the wifi held up. Possibly the only thing missing is a Twitter wall. Look forward to tomorrow’s sessions.

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

RGS Annual Conference

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As mentioned in my previous post, I was up at the RGS Annual Conference for a day last week. As well as my own session, I stayed to listen to a number of sessions, including the cartography one – titled “Why do Geographers Make Maps?”. This one, a double-session, was popular – the room was packed out, and I enjoyed the talks. But my highlight of the day was an evening trip to the John Rylands Library in central Manchester, for an evening viewing of the Mapping Manchester expedition – which got a lot of publicity on that day, in the national press, because of the “Soviet Invasion of Manchester” maps that form part of the collection.

I was delighted too, to see an old (1980) orienteering map in the collection, and a map showing the locations of all (1000s?) of the pubs in Manchester, was quite eye opening! The building that the collection was in was itself pretty awe-inspiring two – it’s neo-gothic style, and reminds me strongly of the (much older) Duke Humphrey’s Library which is deep in the Bodleian Library complex in Oxford. Basically, it’s straight out of “Harry Potter”.

Education Profiling with an Open Source Geostack

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I was in Manchester yesterday for the first day of the Royal Geographical Society annual conference. I gave a talk at the session called “New Urban Geography: Evolving Area Classification for Socio-Spatial Generalisation” which was convened by my boss Dr Alex Singleton and chaired by Prof Paul Longley, both also of the Department of Geography here at UCL.

My talk discussed a Web 2.0-style mashup of English school attainment and geodemographic data, which has been put together as an online “atlas” using OpenStreetMap data as a contextual layer, Mapnik to produce the graphics and OpenLayers to display them. The atlas is not yet complete, and the data is a little old, so it’s not being widely promoted yet, but if you are really keen on visiting it yourself you can find the URL by looking carefully in the presentation…

It is here.



State of the Map 2009 Review

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sotmcrowds

Just back from StateOfTheMap, the OpenStreetMap community’s international conference. I missed the first two conferences but made it along to this year’s in Amsterdam. I skipped the “business day” on Friday and joined the conference for the Saturday and Sunday, when it reverts to being a community conference.

My favourite talks were:

  • Andy Allan showing off some advance cartographic techniques that make “other” maps beautiful and how we could apply them to OpenStreetMap’s default renders.
  • Muki Haklay’s talk on measuring data quality and completeness – turning the “unknown unknowns” into “known unknowns” is something that is becoming increasingly important as the community starts to “market” its data to a wider audience.
  • Mike Miguski’s Walking Papers was very well received and is a brilliant way to make mapping POIs and simple areas easier, without using a GPS. He also showed off some of the lovely looking Stamen map designs.
  • Richard Fairhurst’s lightning talk on Potlatch. Some people might have tried Potlatch a year back, thought “urgh” and gone back to JOSM, but the editor has come a long way recently. Version 1.1, released last week, allows drag-and-drop placement of POIs. Version 2.0 is also on the roadmap and promises a closer look to the Mapnik “default render”.
  • The “State of Japan” talk, while not revealing anything particularly innovative, was very funny and well presented – a simple “nice picture, map before, map after” sequence of slides for each of several shrines and castles in the country. The mapping is very high quality too and shows that OpenStreetMap is more about streets. As an aside, there seems to be a bit of an international “contest” to get the most detailed zoo mapped on OSM at the moment. Amsterdam’s zoo has the individual cages on it, as do several others. London’s is way behind, don’t even have the perimeter on yet.
  • Some of the international lightning talks, from people who had won scholarships from far-off places to come to the conference, were great. I particularly liked Abdel Hassan’s talk about OpenStreetMap in Cairo. GPS receivers have only been legal in Egypt since March!
  • Jorgen Topf’s primer on “proper” GIS and using OpenStreetMap data with it. A topic which the OSM community needs to know more about! It was only the tip of the iceberg, although there’s only so much you can say in 15 minutes.
  • Martin Lucas-Smith’s CycleStreets – attractive looking solution and with a good routing engine that will only get better as the data gets more complete.
  • There was a talk on browser-based rendering of OSM data, which looked pretty exciting.

It was also interesting, for me, to be able to compare with the OSGIS UK conference I also went to, last month.

What I liked more about StateOfTheMap was:

  • This was far and away the most social conference I’ve ever been to. Admittedly already knowing quite a few of the delegates, thanks to UK mapping parties and the London mapping marathon pub trips, helped break the ice, as did being in a city like Amsterdam which naturally lends itself to post-conference relaxing at a canal-side venue. Being stuck in a Travelodge on the edge of a town in the Midlands, or in a modern university campus when the students aren’t around, is never going to have the same opportunities.
  • The full-scale use of technology – not really surprising for a conference by a technology community of course, but it was good to see it being used well, e.g. the Twitter Wall on one of the big TV screens.
  • The conference venue was really nice! New, bright, colourful, with a view of the city. Very Web 2.0. The food and drinks were also excellent. The catering staff even got invited onto the stage at the closing session to be thanked for their good work.

What I liked about OSGIS UK more was:

  • The talks were more consistently high quality. SoTM’s talks were very variable in quality, some of them needed hooking off the stage with a walking stick!
  • All the speakers turned up to speak. Sounds obvious really, but at least two of the SoTM talks were skipped due to speakers not being present. Particularly disappointing was that one of them was the talk I was most looking forward to (about Processing.)

Noticeable about both conferences was:

  • More people than I expected from the big commercial players in the field, despite them in some ways being “rivals” to the concept of open source and OpenStreetMap.
  • Presentations were always short – never longer than 30 minutes and frequently never longer than 15 minutes (or 10 minutes in the case of the “State of Country X” talks, or even 5 minutes for the lightning talks). Even the keynotes were short. This is, by the way, a Good Thing.

sotmcopters

OSM Data & Choropleth Maps

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Here is the presentation I was planning to give as a “lightning talk” at the StateOfTheMap conference this weekend. However, there were more speakers than places for these sessions – and quite a few of the speakers failed to appreciate that, by running over the five-minute limit, they would be denying other people the chance of speaking! So I didn’t get to present it. However, you should be able to get the gist of what I was going to say through the contents of the slides.