Author: Oliver O'Brien

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Conferences

Vienna: Previewing GEMMA

At State of the Map EU I presented a preview of GEMMA, my current UCL CASA funded project, focusing particularly on the OpenStreetMap Feature Highlighter, that will be one of our key data sources – it being an OpenStreetMap conference, I thought this would be of most interest to the audience. GEMMA is more than that though – it will both be a portal of content and created maps, and a mobile application for collection and viewing of data.

Unfortunately my talk clashed with a cartography talk but quite a few people were in my track and saw some screenshots of OpenStreetMap data being highlighted in GEMMA. I also talked about integration with other CASA data sources – GEMMA is a consolidation project to tie together a number of CASA products – and mocked up some examples, focusing on a need to understand more of the demographics of London bike-share cyclists, a current personal interest of mine.

GEMMA is a JISC-funded project that I am working on with Steven Gray. It’s one of the JISCGeo projects, and should launch this autumn. It has its own website and also a blog, where I go into more detail about the project. This is the first CASA project, I believe, to make significant use of OpenStreetMap, and its great that we are now able to take advantage of such a rich and expanding dataset.

Categories
Data Graphics

Human Visualisation

One thing I noticed in Vienna, and passing through Brussels airport on the way home, was a number of “augmented reality” advertising displays, ones that detect people in front of them and then show that on their screens. In all the following, Steve Gray of CASA was the subject being visualised.

Here was the first I saw, at Wien Mitte S-Bahn station, where a special “performance” box was taped out on the platform alongside:

Then, at Vienna Aiport, they had a screen above part of a walkway, which augmented various “forest” animals with passersby. Rabbits and deer would appear, grazing on the “grass” when no one was passing. As people approached, the animals would disappear back into the undergrowth. Passing people on the screen left virtual “leaf trails”, while butterflies would occassionally land on their shoulders. Unfortunately my camera didn’t take a great picture, although you can see a butterfly on someone’s hair and some leaf trails here:

On changing through Brussels, a “heat scanner” showed passing people. This was beside a travelator, so your moment of fame was brief:

Vienna itself currently has a aural art installation from the Royal College of Arts. On walking through the Meccano-like sculpture, detectors would sense you and a nearby speaker would start playing a musical sound. Each detector had a different sound type, but they worked in harmony to produce a kind of song, changing as you and other people moved around:

Sadly, on our arrival into Heathrow, we were back to the regular non-augmented ad experience.

Categories
Bike Share

Vienna: On CityBikes and Bike Lanes

Following on from my previous post – another reason I was particularly pleased to be in Vienna for State of the Map EU, was that Vienna has a bike share system! CityBikes has been around since 2003, it is run by JC Decaux, a commercial operator, but the scheme’s running data is controlled by the city authorities, hence I’m able to include on my Bike Share Map. Obviously I had to have a go, particularly as the scheme is open to tourists with a credit card, and is only 1 euro for as many journeys as you need over 24 hours ever – as long as each journey is less than an hour.

Vienna’s scheme is quite a bit smaller than London’s – it’s spread over a similarly sized area, but the density of stations is much lower (around 20% of London’s), so some advance planning is needed – you don’t generally just come across a stand. Redistribution also seems to be less frequent – for example my local stand remained nearly empty through for the course of the entire trip. Nonetheless I was able to make all three planned trips on the CityBikes, a 100% success rate which London’s disconnected docks and failing keys can’t match.

On the Thursday evening that we arrived, Steve and I borrowed a couple of bikes from a stand right outside the U-Bahn station on the Nachtmarkt and used them to get to the pre-conference drinks which were a couple of miles away to the north. Sign-up took ages – requiring numerous button presses and a password to be entered three times. The paper map in the stand dispenser proved to be quite handy though. We eventually got onto the fantastic, dedicated cycleways which are sensibly built on the pavements rather than the roads in Vienna, and clearly and regularly marked with blue and white cycle roundels on the ground, where errant pedestrians are more likely to look. Vienna’s streets are generally wider than London’s, allowing for such facilities – plus the narrower ones are generally one-way for cars and two-way for bikes. We accidentally headed straight into the old town rather than along the outer ring-road, but then joined the inner ring-road and had a spectacular cycle past the Museum Quarter, Parliament and City Hall. Another missed turn meant we ended up cycling three sides of a square, but we made it eventually and docked with no problems. Our return was similarly indirect – the first stand was empty, then after getting the bikes, we took an unscheduled right turn and discovered that Vienna does in fact have hills. Steve’s bike also proved to be less than road worthy, with the chain slipping and the back wheel wobbling and threatening to come off…

It turns out that there are two generations of bikes currently in use in the system. The newer ones are noticeable in that they have three gears rather than none – geared higher than London’s scheme, allowing some decent speed to be gained. They also have more comfortable handlebars, rotary bells, differently profiled rear lights and strobe front lights. The frame is also slightly different, with a lower support to the back wheel. The gears alone mean there is a considerable advantage in getting one of the new ones. In the photo at the top, the bike on the left and the furthest one on the right are the new generation bikes, while the other four are older. There are also at least four liveries on the bikes across both generations – grey/red, blue, yellow and purple.

The bikes feel heavier than London’s (if that were possible!) and because of the low dip in the middle of the frame, they tend to want to fall over a lot when you stop to look at a map and stand up. Thankfully this is OK as, in Vienna, you are generally on the cycle paths on the pavements, and not the roads themselves.

“Hot docking” – cycling straight into the dock point (a favourite of London commuters) – is just about possible, but more difficult to do than London’s – you need to approach from the left side and line up confidently. Nevertheless we had a go.

Our final trip was more ambitious – four of us OSMers headed right through the old city, past the cathedral, and eventually into the more commercial part of the city, then underneath the huge Praterstern station and right up to the Danube. Here, there is a dedicated cycle track underneath the road bridge. The bridge is however quite a way beyond the area of docking stations, so the other cyclists around were on more serious bikes.

It took us quite a way to get out here – over an hour, but that only resulted in an extra 1 euro charge. On the way back, it started raining as we passed under Praterstern, luckily this was as we passed a large dock, so we finished our return on the U-Bahn.

Categories
Conferences OpenStreetMap

Vienna: State of the Map EU

So – I was at the State of the Map EU (SotM) conference in Vienna last weekend – a European-focused conference on the OpenStreetMap project. I travelled with my colleague Steven Gray and presented some screenshots from the GEMMA project I am currently working on at UCL CASA – more about that in a later post. The two of us, and London OpenStreetMappers Shaun and Tom, stayed at the shiny new Wombat Nachtmarkt hostel which was convieneintly a few minutes walk from the venue at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). I was impressed that, on walking onto the university campus, my phone connected seamlessly to the Eduroam wireless network, based on my UCL credentials – a feat that was not managed in recent trips to more local academic campuses in Manchester and Imperial.

I was impressed with the number of people at the conference – over 200, which was larger than the global SotM conference I was at in Amsterdam two years ago. According to the stats, 2/3rds of people there were from the German-speaking diaspora (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) which demonstrated the clear demand for a SotM conference based here.

I mainly followed the “Tech” track at the conference. I was particularly interested to know about Mapnik Metawriters, which I’m looking to incorporate into some forthcoming Mapnik-based work. You know when you click on Google Map POI icons (not pins) and you get a tooltip with the name of what you’ve clicked on? It’s similar to that. Another highlight included Andy Allan with a tour of custom cartography of OpenStreetMap data. Andy’s cartographic-focused talks are always a visual feast. Unfortunately my own talk clashed, but I managed to make a quick exit after mine and caught the last bit of his.

Another interesting talk was ESRI’s launch of version 2 of their OpenStreetMap editor for ArcGIS – OSMEditor. Of course, you still have to have a copy of ArcGIS in order to be able to use a plugin – so the non-academic, non-commercial audience is unlikely to be using it. I was slightly surprised the presenter didn’t mention the $100 non-commercial licence that is now available for ArcGIS. The $0 price-point for Quantum GIS (which also has an OSM editor plugin) is still going to be unbeatable, but ESRI is certainly going in the right direction. Their engagement with OSM is not something I would have suspected a couple of years ago, it’s great to see them sponsoring and presenting at a conference like this. Of course, having the OSM layer a click away in ArcGIS as a background layer is a good win for them too. And they even let us call them “esri” these days! 🙂

Muki Haklay gave an overview of his team’s completeness analysis for the UK OSM dataset over the years. We used to say we “are good enough”. Now we can say that, subject to qualifications, we are “as good as” some traditional datasets. There was also some similar research presented by Heidelberg University, which used hexagonal cartograms, which was an interesting change from grid squares. I should also mention Steve Coast’s keynote, which was a frank statement of the current state of play of the project – good in many places, but problems with the Australian community feeling disengaged and looking to split from the project were clearly top of his mind.

It was great to meet face-to-face with some major figures in the community – notably Frederick Ramm of GeoFabrik. I managed to sit beside him for half an hour at the conference dinner without twigging who he was. Frederick is one of the authors of the OpenStreetMap book that I reviewed – one of my comments was used as a quotation in the book’s advertising at the conference!

Henk Hoff from the OpenStreetMap Foundation was in fine form, with one of his “poster auctions” at the end of the conference. He also announced the winner of the free trip to the “father” SotM conference in Denver in September being Gregory Marler. Gregory won with his Rebecca Black-esque recording “Fly me to SotM” (I hope he doesn’t mind me saying that!)

The social side of the conference was excellent. Plenty of breaks for networking, and a conference dinner on the Friday night. This involved everyone getting a couple of specially hired 1920s wooden trams (or “Bims” after the sound their bells make) to a suburb of Vienna – via the grand ring-road, past the various palaces and other grand buildings – whereupon we took over most of a restaurant for an Austrian feast of Wiener schnitzel, meat loaf, sauerkraut, picked cucumber, and a dessert of apple strudel. A few resturant-brewery combinations were also visited during the trip – along with some most refreshing lagers, served in proper glasses with handles that make a lovely “clonk”. Vienna was very warm indeed, with a thunderstorm on the first night. It was also eerily quiet – the city is quite grand and spaced out, plus maybe many of the locals were on holiday to the mountains. Certainly the people we met were friendly. I should mention specially the conference organisers, which were flawless and ensured everyone was in the right place at the right time! The organisation of the conference and social events appear to go off without a hitch.

It was a great trip to see what’s going on with the OpenStreetMap development community, present some of our own work at CASA, and explore Vienna.

Categories
Bike Share

Boston’s Hubway Bike Share

The website for Boston’s Hubway bike share launched today. No map of docking stations yet, but it is coming… [Update – map is here and the scheme launches on 26 July.]

The bike share is due to launch at the end of the month and will seem quite familiar to anyone visiting from London (or Toronto or Washington DC) – it’s being run by the same company that designed the system used over here – Alta Bike Share, aka BIXI. Like London, the bikes will have three gears and flashing indicator lights. Pricing is $5 a day (or $60 a year) and then free for each journey under 30 minutes. Only the annual option has a key, daily users need to always use credit cards and print out access codes. The pricing increment for long journeys (over 90 minutes) increases very aggressively, so you really don’t want to do what a lot of Londoners do at the weekend, that is take the bike to your local park for a long picnic and keep it with you for the duration.

The helmet policy is interesting – unlike London where there was no mention of using/not using helmets, here in Boston they are saying that helmets should be worn, even if local laws don’t make it mandatory. Presumably this is to disclaim liability, line up with current local politics, or sponsor requirements.

Talking of sponsors, Boston’s Hubway is one of the few schemes to have a major “title” sponsor, in this case New Balance. There are immediate and obvious synergies with New Balance, a sportswear manufacturer, sponsoring a mode of transport that many see as a leisure activity as well as a utility or commuting tool. Certainly more obvious than Barclays, a bank, that is the title sponsor here in London.

Might we have a Nike scheme in a city soon? Is the Adidas Oxford Bike Share around the corner? You heard it here first! (I have no knowledge of any forthcoming bike shares in other UK cities, apart from the current Bath trial, but Oxford’s strange shape would be eminently suited to bike share if only everybody didn’t already have a bike.)

Categories
Conferences Geodemographics

The Census for the Google Generation

I presented a talk on web visualisation of Census data at a couple of of conferences last week – a seminar at the Market Research Society (MRS) in London on Monday, and an extended version at the Census 2011 Impact and Potential conference on Friday at the University of Manchester. The talk is a look at various visualisations on the web, mainly of the 2001 UK and 2010 US census datasets. It also mentions the CensusProfiler project I worked on last year. I used several examples of work from Chris Gale at UCL Geography, who is working on potential geodemographics of the 2011 census.

I certainly hope to see some of these ideas implemented when the 2011 census aggregate data starts to be released – the “second stage” release, of univariate table at quite detailed (output area) level, is likely to be the most interesting, and is scheduled to happen in late 2012 or 2013, following the first stage release of the core metrics next summer. Having Stamen’s ThisTract webpages, and CUNY’s ethnicity change swipe maps for the UK data, for example, would be excellent.

You can download the talk in PDF form from here.

Categories
Bike Share

Bike in Bath

Spotted by Prof Michael Batty, our director here at CASA, while in Bath at the weekend:

There is very little information on the scheme, on the Internet. As far as I can tell, it was announced as far back as 2008, the scheme is powered by Bicincitta (“Bike in City”) who run numerous small Italian schemes, and there is another (local) operator who is also trialling an automated electric bike scheme at the same time – probably useful considering Bath’s steep hills. The scheme appears to be a prototype and is funded by an EU project called Civitas. Local politics may have got in the way of the scheme’s rollout.

I don’t know whether the scheme has been and gone, whether it’s about to launch or whether it’s in operation now – although Mike didn’t spot any Bicincitta bikes, or indeed any other docking stations, while walking around the centre of the city. This page states that the scheme will start in “Spring 2011” with four stands and 35 bikes.

As far as I can tell there is no website for the scheme, let alone an online map showing where the bikes are. Bicincitta do have a website showing online maps for all their Italian schemes.

Bath’s got some more interesting cycling developments underway – the Two Tunnels project is progressing – eventually two long ex-rail tunnels will be opened for cycling, one of them over a mile long. This latter project at least will be a reason for me to visit Bath if it does open next year – on my own bike.

Categories
Olympic Park

Olympic Non-Update

I was hoping to go for another peek around the perimeter of the Olympic Park this morning, but a key section of the perimeter – the part along the canal near Old Ford Locks – is still blocked off for reworking after a water main burst last year. The notices at the wall blocking off the section assure me that works will be finished by “20 June 2011″…

I did spot an interesting graphic (extract above, or download the full image from here on the ODA Planning Applications website though – an application for a covered bridge between the “WUT” (Warm-Up Track) and the Olympic Stadium, presumably covered to stop freeloaders on the Greenway from glimpsing the athletes, has some nice renderings of what it will look like. One also shows the stadium, covered in the vertical “pennants”, in blue and white, that look like they are the new thinking for the “wrap” around the facility. There’s been no announcement yet that the new-style wrap will be going on the stadium – an earlier design for the wrap was cancelled to save money – but with the Olympic Park currently under budget, hopefully it will happen. A small test section of white wrap remains on the north side of the stadium. That a completed wrap is appearing at least in the latest renderings is encouraging. Another virtual view, showing even more of the stadium is here.

Come September this year, Stratford City – and presumably the accompanying Stratford International DLR station – will be open, taking a huge bite out of the largely rectangular Olympic Park site. This should mean lots of closeup views of the Aquatic Centre and Olympic Village will become possible. I look forward to it!

Categories
Data Graphics London

Sense and the City

The Sense and the City exhibition at the Transport Museum in Covent Garden opens today, and runs until March next year. It includes a number of transport visualisations contributed by the team at UCL CASA, including a themed version of my own Bike Share Map, and a similar animation I’ve done for Oyster card tap ins/outs, and also Dr Martin Zaltz Austwick’s bike movement animation. I was along with Martin (pictured above and below!) and some of the others in the team, for the private view on Wednesday.

The exhibition is in three main sections – downstairs there are a number of big screens, showing the aforementioned animations. The area is quite dark, so the graphics have come out really well. The second section is up a spiral staircase (easy to miss) where a number of touch-screen computers show more visualisations from CASA and others, each selectable by the user. The system that runs this will allow us to update the animations during the course of the exhibition, so if we do some newer related work, you may well see it here! Behind this is the last section, which is more conceptual, with a number of “visions of the future from the past” magazine covers, and other bits of futuristic transport technology – a Sinclair C5 and a “Ryno” one-wheeled motorbike. Sadly a Barclays Cycle Hire bike is not there in the flesh, but you don’t have to walk far from Covent Garden to run into them in real life. Finally, just outside the exhibition area is a “smart” bus-stop. You have to look carefully to spot the video camera, which apparently detects how much interest people are taking in the advertising panel, and adjusts its advertising appropriately.

Of course, being the transport museum, all the regular tube trains and buses are still there. The “New Bus for London” mockup is there, as is a classic Routemaster, and it would have been rude not to have gone for a ride…

Below – the Oyster card animation and Steven Gray’s Tweet-o-Meters.

Categories
OpenLayers

Review: OpenLayers – The Book

OpenLayers 2.10 Beginner’s Guide – Erik Hazard, Packt Publishing

The OpenLayers 2.10 Beginner’s Guide (buy: Amazon) is a guidebook for a technology that is relatively unknown in the broader technology world – OpenLayers being a JavaScript-based online mapping framework, the open-source equivalent of the popular Google Maps API. As mapping and open source software have increasingly become mainstream over the last couple of years, such a guide has appeared at just the right time.

As with many open source projects, documentation and startup guides are freely available online, but their quality and completeness often is very variable. A paper-based guidebook is still the best way to get to grips with the complete capabilities of a complex framework like OpenLayers – but with the danger that it is likely to date quickly as the project evolves. The author is particularly brave in referring to the current version – 2.10 – in the book title, as any subsequent release (2.11 is probably just around the corner) will appear to age the book, while actually it is likely the vast majority of its content will remain relevant with the new version.

The book serves both as an introduction for beginners to JavaScript and/or online mapping, while also acting as a reference that means it can remain in the development bookshelf for even more advanced developers. There is not a standalone reference section – but then the automatically-generated JavaScript documentation online perhaps serves best for this. However the detail of the chapters mean they effectively can act as a near complete reference.

OpenLayers does have a notably steeper learning curve than (for example) the Google Maps API – although it is ultimately more powerful. A physical, complete guide like this does therefore have a definite benefit to a developer aiming to produce online mapping applications based on open source technology.

The book, slightly surprisingly, introduces some fairly weighty programmatic detail right at the beginning – in Chapter 1. For example, I wasn’t expecting a discussion of Object Orientated Programming, and defining objects, instances and classes/subclasses, so early on in the book. It could be argued that these are important concepts to learn early, o gain a good understanding of a powerful API. I do still think that these would be likely to intimidate a genuine beginner, who just wants to quickly create a map.

The second chapter covers Firebug in depth. While again I was not expecting this so early in the book, I can understand why it is introduced at this stage. It is easy to make typos when writing JavaScript, and a working knowledge of Firebug stops painful debugging that might be necessary for someone just starting out with JavaScript development. But it is possible to use OpenLayers and dip into its rich API without knowing about Firebug, and such detail might serve to intimidate a novice, who would get buried in the detail – hence why I was surprised to see this inclusion so early.

It is interesting that OpenStreetMap (OSM) was not introduced until a third of the way into the book. Before, complex concepts such as map projections and coordinate transforms are used. You really don’t need to know these to use OpenStreetMap! OpenLayers is of course used for so much more than just showing OSM maps – at a recent academic conference I was impressed by the number of speakers that showed complex web applications using OpenLayers. But the “simple case” for OpenLayers is pulling in Google Maps or OpenStreetMap map tiles, and putting pins on them – “mashing up” data, without worrying about projections, ESPG numbers, JavaScript debugging and WMS parameters – all of which you’ll meet early on in the book. Only on page 124 is a simple mashup (Google + WMS + vector editing) introduced, with a more complex example application dissected in the very final chapter.

The vector layers – which in my opinion are the most interesting and powerful part of OpenLayers are introduced all the way back in chapter 9. Vector styling – advanced but powerful – is in the chapter after that. There are many complex method calls for vector layers, and so many of these do deserve to be introduced only late on – but introducing a subset of vector capabilities much earlier in the book would have been of benefit.

There are several typos and minor misspellings in the book, including in a couple of code examples, detracted slightly from the clarity of the book.

The OpenLayers 2.10 Beginners Guide is fantastic as a reference – it goes into great detail and is so very useful for advanced users of the OpenLayers API. But it forsakes smoothing the OpenLayers learning curve in favour of a solid ground-working of the detail – great if this is your career, not so great if you just want to download OpenLayers and create a simple map. If you are prepared to spend the time with the detail, then you will emerge an OpenLayers expert!

The book’s accompanying website includes Chapter 9 as a sample. You can also buy the book – OpenLayers 2.10 Beginner’s Guide – from Amazon.