Picture taken from http://www.leedsdatathing.co.uk/events/leeds-data-things-first-event-a-success/

I spoke at the first event (read the write up from Rebecca) about Geospatial visualisations and  OpenStreetMap: Here are the slides:

Since then there has been a few other events as part of Big Data Week - including a load of great short talks.

This weekend there was a data hackday at the UK’s NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care in the centre of Leeds.

There’s a wealth of data on their website , but it was given to us as a mysql database, and we were able to enter remotely. On the first day I poked around the data and had a thought.

Hackdays

I often spend the first part of any hackday wondering what to do, and twiddling thumbs. I find that hackdays become for me a type of busman’s holiday – and this hackday was particularly geographical in nature. Most of the entries had some kind of data on map component. I think that these types of analyses, whilst being very smart and interesting – and may be exactly what the judges are looking for, may not exactly stretch the unexpected or “the hack” in the data.

Fortunately there was plenty of latitude for exploring things laterally. The most interesting dataset was listing the chemicals and drugs each practice spent money on – but I couldn’t find much to do with it.   What caught my eye was the dataset listing the names of the doctors surgeries, practices, medical centres. If I think about my neighbourhood I can pass about half a dozen doctors in a very small area. Leeds is well covered (or perhaps just my area is!) . I was reminded of James Joyce’s quote about being unable to cross Dublin without passing a pub. Perhaps the same can be said for Leeds and doctors!  The names of the surgeries were also interesting. Names such as:

Chapeloak Surgery

The Avenue Surgery

Dr Ca Hicks’ Practice

The Dekeyser Group Practice
The Highfield Medical Centre
Chapeltown Family Surgery

Wonder if the more “leafy” the name, the more “leafy” the neighbourhood it was in? Perhaps the more grandiose sounding practices had more patients? Perhaps the smaller sounding ones had better patient satisfaction reviews?

At the venue, it appeared that I was the only one to be using Linux on the desktop and so the wifi did not work – so I had a bit over one hour to put something together. Decided to go with the concept of “Leeds is covered” and wanted something showing the labels of the practices over the areas where they were. Filling out the map, so to speak.  The hack was called “Tim’s One Hour Data Challenge” and here is the end result:

* Less international folks

* Less big geo personalities and keynotes

* More OSM

* No T-Shirts

* More beer – we drank a large pub dry, literally. The next day, the landlord swore at me for pissing off their regulars.

* More cake

* Cheaper and quicker to run, setup and organise.

For more pointers in how to run an unconference, check out Steve Coast‘s latest post, where he writes about what he did for Wherecamp in Denver.  How I ran a successful unconference in 6 hours and you can too.

Overall, the event was great.

I ran two sessions. The main one was “What is Psychogeography“. The best part of this was sending all participants out with directions in twos and threes, for 10 mins before lunch. They had directions such as “left left right”, “follow someone”, “ask where the centre is, follow that direction, ask again”, “find hidden portals”, “find fairies”, “hear something, take a photo”.

I also quickly slotted in the NYPL Warper presentation, and included this slide. You get 20 points if you know what this refers to!

I also mentioned the words “neogeography” for the first time in the conference, and that was at 3:30pm, which says quite a bit about the use of the term.

Talks I liked were:

* Vernacular Geography & Informal Placenames

* Geo Games

* Education and mobile maps

* Augmented Reality roundup

* How streets get names

* Peoples Collection Wales

* Haptic Navigation

* OSM Talks including – Potlatch 2

* Gregory Mahler’s – I’m a Psycho Mapper!

* OSGEO



How to use it?

http://whoots.mapwarper.net/tms/z/x/y/{layer}/http://path.to.wms.server

Example:

a mapwarper map:

http://whoots.mapwarper.net/tms/!/!/!/2013/http://warper.geothings.
net/maps/wms/2013

viewing it in Potlatch, the OpenStreetMap editor:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?lat=40.73658&lon=-73.87108&zoom=17
&tileurl=http://whoots.mapwarper.net:80/tms/!/!/!/870/http://maps.nypl.org/warper/layers/wms/870

http://hypercube.telascience.org/cgi-bin/mapserv?map=/home/ortelius/
haiti/haiti.map&request=getMap&service=wms&version=1.1.1&format=image/jpeg
&srs=epsg:4326&exceptions=application/vnd.ogc.se_inimage&layers=HAITI&

Goes to:

http://whoots.mapwarper.net/tms/!/!/!/HAITI/http://hypercube.telascience.org/cgi-bin/
mapserv?map=/home/ortelius/haiti/haiti.map

Caveats:

Its’s quite simple, does not do any caching, it just redirects a tile url to an equivalent WMS request. It would only work with WMS servers that accept EPSG:900913 projections, and at the moment, it outputs OSM / Google Tile scheme, not a proper TMS tile scheme.

It’s written in Ruby with the Sinatra micro web application framework. The code is available on GitHub too. http://github.com/timwaters/whoots

A group of volunteers from around the North of England on Saturday 15th May 2010, will attempt to map the entire North Yorkshire town, from every street, bridge, footpath and chip shop – in order to create a free and open map of the town. All welcome, no experience or technology required!

The Association for Geographic Informations Northern Group and the OpenStreetMap Foundation are running a mapping party – a cross between an informal fieldtrip and a hands on workshop. OpenStreetMap is the wikipedia of maps – it’s open, free and anyone can edit and contribute.

Organiser Tim Waters said: “OSM aims to create free geographic data, like street maps, that can be used by anyone, anywhere, and over the Saturday we aim to have a complete map of the streets of Settle and many other features in the town.”

With the announcement of the Ordnance Survey releasing a lot of mid scale mapping data for free, the chances of having a top notch detailed map is greater than ever. By making a free and open map, anyone can edit and correct details, making sure the map stays up to date and relevant. It’s also free to copy and change and distribute, which is impossible to do with almost every other map.

Anyone and everyone is welcome to attend, families and children are also welcome! No previous experience needed, and no GPS units needed either. GPS units will be available for people to borrow, but people can contribute a lot by using a pen and paper. It’s an open organisation with no membership requirements.

People will start assembling at 10 – 10:30 a.m at Ye Olde Naked Man cafe in Settle’s central Market Place, and spend the morning mapping the area. Then they will come back and have some lunch, meeting at 1pm at Thirteen Cafe Bar and either head out again to fill in the gaps, or start editing their notes into the map system. The day comes to an end around half 3pm to 5pm, where volunteers recap on the days mapping, and have a natter over a pint of beer

More information to sign up:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Settle_Mapping_Party

http://www.agi.org.uk/north/

It touched upon the new Ordnance Survey OpenData and it’s impact on OSM, and how we may change the way map in the UK, and then I talked about Haiti too – how what we did “changed disaster response forever” – but only briefly as Anne-Marie Frankland from MapAction gave a great presentation about her work in Haiti, she was one of the first to deploy to the area. Really astonishing and inspiring work they did over there. Hope to be able to see those slides later.

In case you were wondering, MapAction send volunteers out at the very early days of a crisis to provide mapping support and services to responders. During Haiti they produced maps, installed data on GPS devices, trained search and rescue teams how to use them, produced search and rescue sector maps, locational awareness maps, helped identify locations for camps, and a whole host of other things, with not much sleep.

My slides can be found here: http://geothings.net/presentations/osm_agi_north_april2010.ppt

and also at slideshare.net and below

The main page coordinating efforts from OSM is here:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Haiti#2010_Earthquake_Response

We’ve set up a special Map Warper instance at  http://maps.nypl.org/relief/maps has a number of public domain maps that you can warp. Please come along and rectify these maps. OSM volunteers will then trace over the top and add these onto the map.

You can also download them as PDFs here:

Headingley

Headingley_index

And for the curious, the MapOSMatic page : http://www.maposmatic.org/jobs/5493

It’s very very awesome. I hope to do a whole series for Leeds.

http://blog.wonderfullyrich.net/2010/01/uganda-treats-you-right

At the time I thought it was ludicrous that they would suspect a white umuzungu as a terrorist, especially one with such as bad cover story that it took hours to explain what openstreetmaps was, that it was a volunteer activity, and that my reasons for doing this was primarily altruistic and maybe I can make money off selling it later

In keeping with some earlier posts:
Indian Nokia map collectors imprisioned
Mapping as a Terrorist Activity

WhereCampEU is a free unconference for geohackers, mappers, developers, mobile location folks, augmented reality enthusiasts, traditional geographers, neogeographers, psychogeographers, cartography geeks, romantic mappers and geo-hippies  (amongst others!).

Register now for early bird tickets!

Follow the twitter account at @wherecampeu and keep an eye with your RSS readers on http://wherecamp.eu/

If you would like to be a sponsor, and we’d like that very much please contact me at: tim@wherecamp.eu

The Static Maps API helps with embedding map images into any website, and it has a wide range of markers and configuration options.

Simple one-line example: http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~pafciu17/?module=map&bbox=69.2,-47.2,71,-50&width=400&height=250

For example: a map with transparent polygons:

and ones with markers

I think the scale bar rocks too.

You can get the code here:

http://gsoc-os-static-maps-api.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

OpenStreetMap had 6 projects this year with GSOC:

• Preprocessor to add altitude info to OSM data
• Android navigation application using OSM data
• Profile based traffic routing
• OSM direction too for visually impaired
• Automatic street sign detection and reading
• Static Maps API

http://socghop.appspot.com/org/list_proposals/google/gsoc2009/openstreetmap

I really enjoyed being a mentor, and was very fortunate to have a very capable student to work with! Cheers Pawel!