Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, map of a young woman’s movements in Paris, 1957

A map can represent the physical structures of which a city is at any one time composed, but the city itself remains uncharted. This is not only because the city will have changed materially by the time the map appears. A map cannot contain the infinite places that the city contains, which come and go along with the people who pass through them. The map is an abstraction, simplifying experiences that are incomparably more variegated.

From The Silence of Animals. John Gray

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:

The main release we worked towards initially was coined as “GeoCommons 2.0″ – it was released around 10 months after I joined, and included a whole load of stuff. I blogged about it here: Some Stuff I’ve Been Working on in GeoCommons 2.0. Other blog posts also showed how to use the GeoIQ API with OpenLayers, Polymaps, and Leaflet, and about using GEOS with Ruby.

Here then, in no particular order is a quick list of stuff.

• OCEANIDS - A  multitenant GeoIQ instance. “GRID-Arendal’s Ocean Commons for Environmental and Natural resources Information and Data Sharing system .. an interdisciplinary and multi-thematic geospatial and metadata portal of public marine scientific data and information. “
• Created AMQP. RabbitMQ and Resque solutions for background worker and task management
• Added WMS and Tile support for adding new datasources.
• Added spatial query to the feature API – (e.g., getting features within a polygon)
• Created a whole load of analyses methods, including some of the usual suspects like intersection, buffer, clip, simplify.
• Developed a Ruby API Wrapper library for the GeoIQ API
• Worked on the GeoCommons open source geocoder.
• Worked on filter user interface for map and data views
• Added OAuth authentication to the system and API Keys for developers

More important than the work were the people I worked with – hugely talented enthusiastic and smart developers, designers and all round human beings – You can get rid of the code if you like, but I’ll miss working with these folks the most!

“List of Interesting Things to Do”

Generally the world of geo and OSM in particular has grown up in the last 3 years – there are now hundreds more possibilities for paid work, and more opportunities abound. My “List of Interesting Projects” stored in my brain was getting longer as time went on. So, I wanted to ride this wave, work on some exciting stuff, and have a break from working full time.

As a freelancer I’m working on some open source geo stuff and hope to spend more time volunteering for HOT and with OSM in general.   I’ll also be tackling that long list of interesting projects to do! One of those projects is actually a time travel conference, so watch this space next year.

I’ll also be part of a cooperative company called Topomancy LLC, with Shekhar Krisnan and Schuyler Erle – and together we will continue (previously was called Entropy Free) our work with the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress, and a number of other orgs on open source geo.

Really enjoyed my time with GeoIQ/Esri DC Dev and have learnt loads.  I wish them well for the future and will keep an eye on their progress within Esri – I know they will be doing awesome stuff!

There appears to be more North pubs in London than anywhere else, and more West pubs in the north (and north west?) of England…

I’m still configuring the mail server, so if new users when signing up are seeing mail in spam boxes, let me know!

Cheers!

Plain Tile Maker was my weekend project – a mapping tile service that serves one colour tiles as a tile basemap.
There are about 268 colours to choose from – basically anything that the underlying library (Imagemagick) supports.
It was developed for me to play around on the Heroku platform, and as a response to a GeoCommons.com user question, where the user wanted a way to show just a plain one colour background.
This solution is more flexible, and really easy.

The format is

http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/colorname/X/Y/Z.png

So for example,

http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/DodgerBlue/0/0/0.png

http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/bisque/12/3/32.png

And in return you get a 256×256 sized image of that colour.

DodgerBlue

bisque

You can use it in your mapping libraries, for example: With OpenLayers:

var colourTile = new OpenLayers.Layer.XYZ(
 "Plain Colour Tile",
 "http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/colourName/${z}/${x}/${y}.png", 
 { sphericalMercator: true,
 buffer: 1,
 numZoomLevels: 17
 }
);

And with Leaflet:

new L.TileLayer('http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/colourName/{x}/{y}/{z}.png', {maxZoom: 18});

Or you can add them to GeoCommons quite easily. Add

http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/colorName/{X}/{Y}/{Z}.png

in the Add a URL link, choosing Map Tile URL from the format, and  then give it a nice name when prompted.

Here’s the Bisque tiles in GeoCommons.

I’ve used the in a map it to give a ghosting effect over the basemap, and to just show my own boundaries. http://geocommons.com/maps/181231  is a map made with some World Boundaries over the plain bisque map we had just added. I’ve also overlaid the Acetate Labels layer on top for context.

Want to know more? The code for this is on github.

Today the twitterverse and blogosphere were abuzz with the discovery that Apple had made the switch to use OpenStreetMap in their iPhoto application. At the moment, it appears to be so, but there’s no attribution yet. Compare for yourselves : http://ivan.sanchezortega.es/leaflet-apple.php  But take it from me, I have personally surveyed using a GPS unit and mapped paths in woods which are not on any map anywhere else (not legal footpaths) which appear on Apples map.