Author: Oliver O'Brien

OOMap 2.4 – Add Plaques from Open Plaques

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 8 June 2015
2 Comments on OOMap 2.4 – Add Plaques from Open Plaques

oomv24

OpenOrienteeringMap can now automatically import the locations and details, of public plaques, as suggested controls, into the area where you are creating a map. The service uses the API from Open Plaques, which is a global open-source database of public plaques. In the London, the most commonly known plaques are the “Blue Plaques“, which are put up by English Heritage and typically mark the houses where the great and good of times past live. However, there are many other types and colours of plaques which are also recorded in the database and accessible now on OpenOrienteeringMap. Thanks to Jez and the team at Open Plaques for building a comprehensive open database, with a fast and flexible API to access it. Once you’ve placed your map, just click “Add Plaques” and a control will be created to represent each plaque. The locations are sometimes imprecise so ground-truthing is always recommended.

If you discover plaques that are not in Open Plaques, then please add them to the project so that OOM and other services can benefit from the extra data. Additionally, if you discover more accurate locations for plaques, you can update Open Plaque with this information. If you take photos, add them to Flickr or WikiCommons, tagging with their Open Plaques ID to link each photo to its corresponding record.

The functionality is similar to importing postboxes, another popular control type for informal Street-O events, which was added in v2.3, except that the plaques are available across the global and other editions of OpenOrienteeringMap, as well as the UK edition. However, please note that, at the time of writing, plaques have been most widely recorded in the UK, USA and Germany, each of which has over 5000 plaques. Other countries have (a lot) fewer, so you are likely to see a “no plaques available” message when you try and import them in to places in other countries, except perhaps in the centre of major cities.

Also for v2.4 I’m using newer versions of the JQuery and JQuery-UI libraries, and have slightly tweaked the user interface for the new Plaques button. The paper orientation toggle also now has some nice logos, and some bugs relating to tip display have been fixed.

Try it out now. As ever, OpenOrienteeringMap is completely free to use, if you find it useful for your event, and it saved a lot of time for you or your club mapper, then feel free to tip, see the links in the pink box.

(N.B. The full plaque text is used as the control description, so this should be edited and partially removed, should you use the automated clue sheet option in OpenOrienteeringMap, so that the competitor has to prove they are there by writing an appropriate part of the text.)

stratford_plaque

Notes

Going Android with the Huawei Ascend G7

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 2 June 2015
No Comments on Going Android with the Huawei Ascend G7

huawei_ascendg7 This post is about an Android perspective from the the point-of-view of a long time iPhone user. I’ve been an Apple tech-enthusiast for most of my life and have had an iPhone in my pocket for a good 5-6 years. However I have now acquired a Huawei Ascend G7 phone with Android “KitKit” on it, + the Huawei interface extensions. Huawei are gradually making a name for themselves for producing phones with a premium feel and near-top-range features, for a good price. The Ascend G7 is selling for around £200 in the UK but, in spec and feel, is only a smidgen below the Apple iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy S6 which are up at £500+. Apple is making an awful lot of money from phones so clearly there is a cheaper way – this could be it.

Plus it was the right time to move – my current iPhone 4 is working perfectly well, is fast and has a nice screen, but Apple has decided to cut me out of getting the newest software – iOS 8 – and apps are starting to appear that require this version, e.g. Trails, which looks awesome.

N.B. I’ve actually had the phone for a couple of months, but I wrote the below around 48 hours after getting the new phone.

48 Hours into Android

Things I Miss

So, there’s quite a lot I miss from iPhone. This is to be expected, but here goes:

Universal “jump to top” gesture. This is what I miss most, oddly. Particularly when reading long webpages, but for other apps too, e.g. Feedly and my mail app. Many apps have a way of doing this but it’s slightly different in each.
Web Apps are self-contained rather than being just browser views, so if you want to change to a separate website, you have to go to the browser proper rather than accesssing a URL bar there and then.
Combined view for multiple email accounts. This does exist, but only for the inbox, and I can’t move emails to folders, in this view. Solution is to use a better email client than the built-in one.
Unread notification numbers attached to app icons. They do exist for the Phone, Mail and Messaging apps but not for, for example, Twitter or Facebook. This inconsistency is really annoying!
The clock in the centre at the top, not on the right. I guess I had just got used to it on the right.
The phone is less comfortable to hold when reading with one hand, as it’s wider and thinner. I’ve partially fixed this issue by getting a case.
Some of the big apps, e.g. Twitter, have a surprisingly different feature set and look-and-feel between iOS and Android. I was expecting the transition to be more seamless.
Some apps (e.g. BBC News player) don’t respect the rotation-off setting.
Being able to switch the sound completely off – even to the point of no vibration – is worrying. What if I make my alarms completely silent?
I initially missed the physical “Home” button, I can live with the virtual one, although it would be nice if it stayed in the same place and was always visible.
Intuitive copy-and-paste of text. Text selection tools are clunky, particularly has different apps have different interfaces for copy/paste.
In a similar vein, same apps don’t allow me to see where a URL is pointing to, before clicking on it.
In-browser display of PDFs and other content.

The Good Bits

Now that that list is out of the way, here’s what I really like:

Google Now voice detection has no problem understanding my (rather English sounding) accent and almost always gets it right. It’s a shame however that often it just forward to a regular Google web search.
The camera is pretty nice. Initially it seemed to have problems with focusing but that seems to work better now and the quality of the images coming out are generally pretty good. The multi-focus feature, in particular, is a good way to almost guarantee focus.
Having files are great. Finally I can see what’s on my phone in an organised way.
The battery is good, particularly as I’d anecdotally heard this was Android’s Achilles Heel. It’s happily last more than a day.
Bluetooth transfer of media to other nearby phones. Although it’s still not as easy as it should be.

Almost every app I liked on my iPhone is also available for Android too.

Android is Not Perfect

On a general (non-iPhone-user) basis, here’s a list of gripes about the phone and about Android:

Notification panel. Notifications get truncated and there’s no way to reveal their full text in most case – touching goes to the app concerned which may (or may not) reveal what the notification said.
Lots of bundled games which are severely limited (e.g they quit after 3 minutes. That’s not long enough to get hooked on a game!)
Apps lurk in the background using a lot of resource. This can be cleared down manually with phone manager but it’s a pain to remember to do this.
Google Maps app kept crashing when doing directions. This was fixable by updating to the latest version. It’s odd though that this updating of core apps like Google Maps didn’t get done automatically.
Some poorly designed icons clash with the theme icon containers. Facebook Messenger has so far been the worst for this.
Pre-installed which seem to do quite similar things. E.g. Settings and Google Settings. Google Now, Voice Search and Voice Dialler. Browser and Chrome. (Why not just Chrome?)
The “updater” app doesn’t update apps (see above) but (I think) just the operating system code. Instead, Google Play does the updating. Multiple apps for similar functionality…
I haven’t found Process Viewer yet.

Overall – Android is pretty good, but suprisingly buggy and unintuitive, which is odd considering how much effot has gone into engineering it and how many people now use it. I’ve listed a lot of quirks above. However, looking at the bigger picture, they are nothing I can’t live with and really, considering how die-hard I was as an iPhone user, the transition was pretty painless.

As a phone, the Ascent G7 is really nice, it feels every bit as good as an iPhone, and is really available at a bargain. Huawei are taking the time to create a high quality product without the silly pricing. In a market full of naff, cheap phones, or hugely expensive market leaders, this is refreshing. I should have switched earlier…

Data Graphics OpenLayers

General Election Maps for 2015

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 11 May 2015
No Comments on General Election Maps for 2015

When I first moved to UCL CASA back in 2010, the first online map I created from scratch was one showing swings in the general election that year. So it seemed fitting to update the old code with the data from the 2015 general election, which took place last week. You can see the resulting maps here – use the dropdowns to switch between headline swing, winner, second places, turnout % variations, majorities, political colour and individual party votes and X-to-Y swings.

My style of Javascript coding back in 2010 was – not great. I didn’t use JQuery or event AJAX, choosing instead to dump the results of the database query straight into the Javascript as the page was loaded in, using PHP. I was also using OpenLayers 2, which required some rather elaborate and unintuitive coding to get the colours/shapes working. My custom background map was also rather ugly looking. You can see what the map looked like in this old blog post. I did a partial tidyup in 2013 (rounded corners, yay!) but kept the grey background and slightly overbearing UI.

Now, in 2015, I’ve taken the chance to use the attractive HERE Maps background map, with some opacity and tinting, and tidied up the UI so it takes up much less of the screen. However, I decided to leave the code as OpenLayers 2 and not AJAX-ify the data load, as it does work pretty well “as is”. The constituency boundaries are now overlaid as a simplified GeoJSON (OL 2 doesn’t handle TopoJSON). For my time map, I was using OL 3 and TopoJSON. Ideally I would combine the two…

Link to the interactive maps.

London

Engineering Tour: The Thames Barrier

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 5 May 2015
No Comments on Engineering Tour: The Thames Barrier

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I was recently able to have a behind-the-scenes tour of the huge Thames Barrier structure in east London, thanks to the IET London branch – I’m not a member of the IET (although I used to be) but spotted a tweet from them advertising the tour, so was able to sign up.

As an “engineering” tour, we were able to get right onto the barrier itself, onto one of the “piers” in the middle of the river. Accessing this is fairly involved. The operational site is under very high security indeed, as befits the importance of the barrier during a flood event and the impact that an uncontrolled flood would have on various critical parts of central London, including the Canary Wharf financial district and the South Bank. Once in, getting to the pier involves crossing a short bridge over the first barrier section that is in fact completely dry at low tide) and then accessing one of two tunnels that run almost completely underneath the Thames, with stairs (for the west tunnel) or lifts (for the east tunnel) linking to the piers themselves. The two tunnels are completely separate from each other, for redundancy/safety reasons, so if one of the tunnels was breached, full access to all the piers would still be possible. The tunnels are fairly small, they have reinforced rings like a tube tunnel, but are quite a bit smaller, and contain numerous ducting cables and pipes. They are dead straight, so looking down one makes for quite an eye-catching vista.

tbt1

tbt3 Each pier has two “hull like” buildings which are silvery on the outside, but surprisingly made of wood on the inside. The smaller one houses the top of the aforementioned lift shafts, while the larger one houses the machinery for rotating the huge barrier pieces. Normally, a close or open event takes a couple of hours – in fact, the barrier is quite capable of closing in a couple of minutes, but this is never used, partially because tidal events are fairly predictable with around 24 hours notice (being based on tide, wind direction, upstream flow and air pressure) and partially because a sudden closure/opening would have a negative impact on the ecosystem of the river – likely impacting flora/fauna in the river, and structures on the the banks (I presume this is from sudden changes in water salinity, level or pressure).

The larger pier building also has an attractive circular window, facing upstream. From the river, it is quite a distinctive feature of the barrier as you approach it. The circular shape again is a play on the barrier piers having a boat theme.

The equipment in the piers is large and impressive. Some of it looks pretty old – the Thames having been built in the 1980s but designed in the 1970s, based on 1960s technology that had to be “proven” for a decade before, so harking back to the 1950s. But it is kept in great working order and does the job well – which is just as well, as the barrier had to close during the Spring 2014 floods nearly 50 times – almost as many times as it had closed in the preceding 30 years.

Anyway, it was a fascinating tour, and thanks to the IET London branch for organising. The tour guides were retired engineers who had worked on the barrier itself for many years, so it was very informative visit.

tbt2

Data Graphics London OpenStreetMap

Street Trees of Southwark

Above is an excerpt of a large, coloured-dot based graphic showing the locations of street trees in Rotherhithe, part of the London Borough of Southwark in London, as released by them to the OpenStreetMap database back in 2010. You can download the full version (12MB PDF). Street trees are trees on public land managed by LB Southwark, and generally include lines of trees on the pavements of residential streets, as well as in council housing estates and public parks. By mapping just the trees, the street network and park locations are revealed, due to their linear pattern or clumping of many types of trees in a small area, respectively. Trees of the same genus have the same colour, on this graphic.

Why did I choose Southwark for this graphic? Well, it was at the time (and still is) the only London borough that had donated its street tree data in this way. It is also quite a green borough, with a high density of street trees, second only to Islington (which ironically has the smallest proportion of green space of any London borough). There are street tree databases for all the boroughs, but the data generally has some commercial value, and can also be quite sensitive (tree location data can useful for building planning and design, and the exact locations of trees can also be important for neighbourly disputes and other damage claims. It would of course be lovely to have a map of the whole of London – one exists, although it is not freely available. There are street tree maps of other cities, including this very pretty one of New York City by Jill Hubley. There’s also a not-so-nice but still worthy one for Washington DC.

Also well as a PDF version, you can download a zip-file containing a three files: a GeoJSON-format file of the 56000-odd street trees with their species and some other metadata, a QGIS style file for linking the species to the colours, and a QGIS project file if you just want to load it up straight away. You may alternatively prefer to get the data directly from OpenStreetMap itself, using a mechanism like Overpass Turbo.

A version of this map appears in London: The Information Capital, by James Cheshire and Oliver Urberti (who added an attractive colour key using the leaf shapes of each tree genus). You can see most of it below. I previously talked about another contribution I made to the same book, OpenStreetMappers of London, where I also detailed the process and released the data, so think of this post as a continuation of a very small series where I make available the data from my contributions to the book.

The data is Copyright OpenStreetMap contributors, 2015, under the Open Database Licence, and the origin of most of the data is a bulk-import supplied by Southwark Council. This data is dated from 2010. There are also some trees that were added manually before, and have been added manually since, by other OpenStreetMap contributors. These likely include some private trees (i.e. ones which are not “street” trees or otherwise appear on private land.) Many of these, and some of the council-data trees, don’t have information their genus/species, so appear as “Other” on the map – orange in the above extract.

Conferences

GISRUK 2015

The week before last I was at GISRUK, the long-running annual academic conference for early (and not-so-early) career researchers in GI Science in the UK, Ireland and further afield. This year’s conference was in Leeds and attracted a record number of 250+ participants. I presented a poster at a meeting the day before the main conference, but otherwise had no talk to give at Leeds, which means I was able to relax and focus on seeing the most interesting sessions. This year we had some great keynotes, including two visually impressive talks from Google’s Ed Parsons and MIT’s Sarah Williams, opening and closing the conference respectively. Outside of the keynotes, there were three main streams running simultaneously, but with the theme regularly changing after each group of talks, which meant for plenty of room swapping.

Some of my favourite talks:

With a large UCL attendance, there were plenty of talks on geodemographics and socioeconomic mapping. One of my favourites was from Monsuru Adepeju of the UCL Crime, Policing and Citizenship project, the talk looked at a new way of detecting crime hotspots. The presentation included the below map showing a crime-weighted geodemographic map of London.
Staying with UCL and geodemographics, but going from crime to food, this classification, developed alongside a major food retailer in the UK, was presented by UCL’s Guy Lansley of the Consumer Data Research Centre, the work linked ethnic-weighted classifications with the popularity of certain food types, to simplify the task of providing particular food-types popular with one or more major ethnic groups in the UK, as the country’s population demographic continues to change and move.
Staying with the geodemographic theme, Mark Birkin of Leeds gave an overview of geodemographics research in the era of big data, where ever increasing amounts of data allow ever more sophisticated analysis to be performed. The below image shows a slide from a presentation presenting a very detailed geodemographic map – right down to postcode (typically 50 homes) level.
Away from geodemographics and to cartography: Jonny Huck of Lancaster presented the results of a study into creating a number of map types that encouraged good interaction with the map itself – the aim making maps for mobile devices that were engaging and encouraged people to look at the screen frequently when navigating – but not being so difficult to interpret that they were frustrating. Four styles of map, of the Lancaster University campus, were created from a Google Maps base, and participants were asked to navigate around the campus. The style that proved to be most effective in terms of engagement, while being fun to use, was the “PacMap”, a screenshot of which is shown below. Ironically Google released an unrelated PacMap for the whole world, as part of this year’s “April Fool” Google Maps hack.
Ed Manley of UCL showed some results of using mobile phone data to derive patterns of mobility through certain parts of an urban area, showing that different communities experience their cities in different ways and to different extents.
I didn’t see the presentation by Robin Lovelace (Leeds) on his work-in-progress on creating an R/Shiny-based tool for visualising current inter-neighbourhood cycling flows, and predicting future flows based on several scenarios, but I did get a demo of the tool, which is looking impressive, and will be a powerful way to communicate and interrogate a complex dataset.
Some other highlights included TransportOAC (Nick Bearman, Liverpool) which is a geodemographic map focused on who people move around the UK. The classification is relatively “noisy” spatially, and London’s unique transport system (compared with the rest of the UK) means it gets a number of classification groups to itself. I also enjoyed Nilufer Aslam’s talk about linking metro smartcard data (from TfL’s Oyster Card) with journey and usage information of bikeshare systems, to see whether they indeed formed a “last mile” option for commuters, and how availability patterns affected this.
I presented a poster, below, on DataShine, at the poster session for a meeting immediately prior to GISRUK. The poster summarises the three websites that are my principal output thus far, from the BODMAS project.

So, an excellent conference, full of interesting talks on geodemographics and various other GIS-related research. Thanks to the organisers for their hard work in staging a smoothly-run and successful three days.

Reviews

Book Review: GIS Cartography (2nd Ed)

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 19 April 2015
No Comments on Book Review: GIS Cartography (2nd Ed)

GIS software is used by many professionals to process spatial information, but the results are often poorly presented and the resulting map can be unattractive. GIS packages, such as QGIS, are increasingly including a broad range of cartographic styling and map design options, to present synthesised spatial data attractively, but it remains all too easy to produce a map without due consideration for its presentation. The old, non-geospatial approach produces beautiful maps in regular graphic applications, e.g. Illustrator, but these lose the data linkages and spatial analysis capabilities of GIS that produce the data to be mapped in the first place. Then there’s the new “slippy map” online map websites that provide a whole new set of tools to allow anyone – be they a geospatial professional or not – to create maps. It can however be all to easy to produce maps with these tools that are unhelpful, look ugly, are difficult to interpret or worst of all are downright misleading.

GIS Cartography, by Gretchen Peterson, is a book that seeks to address these problems, seeking to guide GIS software users and web designers alike to produce maps that contain good cartographic design, harking back to when maps were produced by a dedicated “offline” cartographer. The book does this by taking a structured approach to the elements of data-driven maps, and examining and commenting on each of these in detail.

The book is largely technology-agnostic, not detailing operations for specific GIS software or online mapping APIs but instead outlining the basic concepts of good digital maps that users of such software should normally be able to implement. Peterson is not afraid to espouse her opinion – her experience in the field means that her view is a salient and sensible one. For example, the author has a distinct dislike for the use of logos on maps – arguing for them to be minimised – or ideally dropped altogether, while making the creator’s name more prominent than is often the case. I particularly liked the discussion on fonts and the display of text – perhaps not an area traditionally dwelled on by GIS-focused map makers. For example, different kinds of text halo application are demonstrated well, with a set of excellent graphics. One section of the book that I felt was overlong however was the section on the colour palettes for feature types. Gretchen is attempting to cover all common types of GIS maps (from political to soil) but the detail is overwhelming. By contrast, the section detailing colour blindness issues with maps (which I frequently get caught out with) was succinct.

Online cartography is dealt with in the last chapter “Zoom-Level Design”. This section reflects the recent rise of online mapping software (Google Maps, OpenLayers, Leaflet, etc) used by non-professionals, with the core part of the book solidly focused on the regular desktop GIS (ArcGIS, QGIS, MapInfo, etc). The section focuses on the issues of scale and generalisation for maps designed to be viewed rapidly at multiple zoom levels. Ideally the book would integrate the online and offline (or “slippy map” and “GIS window”) worlds throughout its length rather than addressing online mapping in a single chapter. Of course, many of the aspects presented in the main part of the book – particularly relating to colour and adornments – are also applicable to this kind of mapping.

One slight irony is the variable quality in the design and reproduction of the illustrations in the book itself. Many of them are rather traditional looking, and some are quite pixellated. The generic look is likely because of the desire of the author to keep the book as neutral and platform-independent as possible.

Overall this is an excellent and comprehensive guide to ensuring high quality cartographic output from GIS users and slippy map creators. If you read it from cover you’ll build up an excellent set of guidelines for maps with a rigorous high quality. Alternatively you can dip in to it from time to time when you need advice on specific aspects of your mapmaking, such as tips on how to do scale bars or inset maps well. Even if you are already experienced with mapmaking from GIS software, you’ll quite become aware of design aspects you hadn’t previously considered. If you regularly create online maps, or find yourself increasingly using a GIS to create and output maps straight for presentation, this is an essential book in your professional collection.

GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design (Second Edition)
Author: Gretchen Peterson, Publisher: CRC Press. 299 pages. Out now.

Further information on Amazon.

Thanks to the Society of Cartographers for arranging a review copy. This review may appear in the society’s Bulletin in due course. I am happy to accept copies for review of other books in this and related fields – send to Oliver O’Brien, Dept of Geography, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. Review copies can be returned on request, if an SAE is included.

Data Graphics OpenLayers

Election Time!

electiontime

I’ve created an Election 2015 Time Map which maps the estimated declaration times that the Press Association have published. It follows on from a similar map of the Scottish independence referendum.

Each constituency is represented by a circle which is roughly in its centre (using a longest-interior-vertex centroid determined in QGIS). The area of the circle represents the size of the electorate, with the Isle of Wight being noticeably larger, and the Western Isles and Orkney/Shetland constituencies smaller, than average. The main colours show the expected time (red = around midnight, falling to green for the slow-to-declare constituencies late in the morning) while the edge colour shows the 2010 winning party. Mouseover a constituency circle for more data. Grey lines shows the constituency boundaries, created from ONS data (for Great Britain) and aggregating NISRA small area and lookup data (for Northern Ireland). You can download the resulting TopoJSON file, which is simplified using MapShaper. The data is Crown Copyright ONS/NISRA.

As the election approaches, and after the results come in, I hope to modify and update the map with other constituency-level data, such as the result itself.

London

Out of Station Interchanges (OSIs)

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 31 March 2015
1 Comment on Out of Station Interchanges (OSIs)

osi_nlondon
Stations on the tube map with multiple lines are normally shown with a white circle (except where obscured by a disabled access blob) indicating connections where you can change lines there, while continuing on a single journey (and so not have to pay for two). However, there are a number of connections not shown on the map. These are Out of Station Interchanges (OSIs) and generally involve a walk out through ticket barriers, along a road or two, and back through more barriers. However, TfL will do the maths to ensure that you still only get charged for a single journey altogether – so long as you don’t spend too long a time between the two sets of barriers. TfL is quite secretive about these “hidden” free interchanges, likely because marking/highlighting the links and limit times would be tedious* so the current list is maintained by frequent Freedom of Information Requests. I’ve taken the current list, excluded interchanges with National Rail, and added the remaining (TfL to TfL) OSIs to my Tube Data Map. The OSIs are shown by white circles, connected together with white lines and black borders. There are a few more, where I’ve already joined OSI-linked stations as being actually in the same place. Sometimes you can leave and then reenter barriers within a single barriered area – for instance, you can leave the barriers at Bank and go back in them at Monument, without paying for two journeys (so long as you take less than 15 minutes to do so). However you can also get between the two stations while staying behind the barriers. N.B. If you change the date to 2019 then it shows the OSIs that will likely be added for Crossrail, when the central section starts running then.

Many of the OSIs are for links between the Underground and Overground, as the latter network is not otherwise particularly well connected. The longest Tfl-TfL OSI is from West Ruislip to Ickenham, in outer west London – it’s over a kilometre to walk between the two, but the link helps Central Line uses get easily to and from the transport hub at Uxbridge.

* They do however highlight a few at stations, e.g. Clapham High-Street to Clapham north. Some others have some street-signs pointing the way, e.g. Seven Sisters to South Tottenham.

Map background from HERE maps.

Technical

OS Open

Ordnance Survey have this week released four new additions to their Open Data product suite. The four, which were announced earlier this month, are collectively branded as OS Open and include OS Open Map Local, which, like Vector Map District (VMD), is a vector dataset containing files for various feature types, such as building polygons and railway stations. The resolution of the buildings in particular is much greater than VMD – surprisingly good, in fact. I had expected the data to be similar in resolution to the (rasterised) OS StreetView but it turns out it’s even more detailed than that. The specimen resolution for OS Open Map Local is 1:10000, with suggested uses down to a scale of 1:3000, which is really quite zoomed in. Two new files in OS Open Map Local are “Important Buildings” (universities, hospitals etc) and “Functional Areas” which outline the land containing such important buildings.

osopendata_oldnew
osvmd_osm

Above: Comparing the building polygon detail in the older Vector Map District (top left), previously the largest scale vector building open data from Ordnance Survey, and the brand new OS Open Map Local (top right). The new data is clearly much higher resolution, however one anomaly is that roads going under buildings no longer break the buildings – note the wiggly road in the centre of the top left sample, Malet Place, which runs through the university and under a building, doesn’t appear in full on the right. Two other sources of large-scale building polygons are OS StreetView (bottom left), which is only available as a raster, and OpenStreetMap (bottom right). The OS data is Crown Copyright and Database right OS, 2015. The OSM data is Copyright OSM contributors, 2015.

The other three new products, under the OS Open banner, are OS Open Names, OS Open Rivers and OS Open Roads. The latter two are topological datasets – that is, they are connected node networks, which allow routing to be calculated. OS Open Names is a detailed gazetteer. These latter three products are great as an “official”, “complete” specialised dataset, but they have good equivalents on the OpenStreetMap project. OS Open Map Local is different – it offers spatial data that is generally much higher in accuracy than most building shapes already on OpenStreetMap, including inward facing walls of buildings which are not visible from the street – and so difficult for the amateur mapper to spot. As such, it is a compelling addition to the open data landscape of Great Britain.

The OS also confirmed last week the location for its new Innovation Hub. It is indeed a mile from King’s Cross – specifically, it’s in Clerkenwell, and the hub will be sharing space with the Future Cities Catapult. Conveniently the new space has a presentation space and the May Geomob will be taking place there.