Kinugasa Campus
Ritsumeikan University
Kyoto, Japan

Representation & Visualization in GIS:
Emerging Trends, New Methods
Michael BattyUniversity College London
www.casa.ucl.ac.uk

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Outline
Pushing pictures – displaying and communicating data,
spatial data – it’s all about Web 2.0!
GMapCreator and ImageCutter
MapTube: a kind of YouTube + Napster
Pulling pictures – pulling spatial data – crowdsourcing,
Survey Mapper
Seriously Capturing and Scraping Data: Twitter andonline streaming, London Bikes
2D to 3D: GIS to CAD and back and on the web
The future – disseminating spatial data in multimedia –for Advanced
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We will begin by
Pushing pictures – displaying and communicating data,
spatial data – it’s all about Web 2.0!
GMapCreator and ImageCutter
MapTube: a kind of YouTube + NapsterUsing Maps to Visualize Pictures

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Tooth courtesy ofJohan Lundin
Biomedical Informatics Research Group
Department of Oncology
University of Helinski
http://www.webmicroscope.net/

The Kremer Collection
http://www.thekremercollection.com/

One of my key points in this talk is thatsoftware being developed for a particularspatial application often easily generalises
to a quite different one ….. But let me firstoutline my talk before elaborating
http://chs75.harvard.edu/manuscripts/
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GMapCreator and ImageCutter
The Google Map
Creator creates Google
Maps websites fromthematic data containedin shapefiles.
It effectively layers yourmap on top of a Google
Map or the Google Map
For audiences other thanyourselves, I always haveto make the point that amap is not a picture – it isa bunch of vector
geometries and a set of
attributes – and a shape file is a proprietary but widely used format by ESRILet us see how it works
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We can do the same sort of thing in 3D of course with
GEarthCreator – the key is to convert the shapefiles
to KML files – and there are many other maphacks
using similar open map bases like Open Street Map

From all of this we havedevised an open resource
for maps called MapTube
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MapTube: a kind of YouTube + Napster
Let me explain: every time someone downloads oursoftware, there is a high probability they make a map.
As it sits on a common base – a Google Map – if theycreate the map of some place and someone else
creates another map of the same place, it would benice if we or they could compare them as layers
However, in the UK map bases are copyrighted – you candone for copying OS map data and it is serious –So we ask the user not to put their map created from oursoftware on our site, but to give us their URL where
their map is and thus MapTube is a bunch of pointers
to URLs - this is what it looks like with demofor Advanced
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Here are some of the user map data in/on MapTube

12345

6

1. Knife Crime Update, 2. SC IMD Score, 3. SEC IMD Score, 4. PCT Obesity, 5.
NO2 Bristol, 6. AGFC Wildlife
The data behind the knife crimes map (1) has been in the news the last few
days after it emerged that the Government had manipulated the data.

7891011

7. Southeast IMD, 8. Southeast IMD (LSOA), 9. Wild Land Quality Scotland, 10.
NSSeC L8 (never worked)%, 11. CO2 index
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Pulling pictures – pulling spatial data – crowdsourcing
We have turned all this around and basically used thesystem to record spatial responses to topical questions
We broadcast the questions through TV and radio andthen ask users to respond and key in their post code –7 digit in UK but actually only record postcode sector –first three or four digitsThen our server issues a request to scan the continuallyrefreshed database and rebuilds the map on the fly soto speak, every half hour, using GMapCreator etc
We have so far looked at the credit crunch, antisocial
behaviour and the Manchester road pricing proposal
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23,475 responses
April, May, June 2008
A new credit crunch
survey started in
October and currently
has 3,802 responses.

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BBC Look East: Anti-Social Behaviour
July, August,
September 2008
6,902 responses

http://www.maptube.org/lookeast
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Manchester Congestion Charge
15,902 responses
October to December 2008

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BBC Look East: Credit Crunch
September 2008
2,052 responses(with age group)

http://www.maptube.org/LookEastCreditCrunch/
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GeoVUE Family Tree
GeoVUEGoogleImage
Tools

GMap
ImageCutter

PhotoOverlay
CreatorBigImage
CutterBayScience

Second
Life

GMapCreator

Shape
Builder

GEarthCreator

MapTubeLondon
Profiler

VirtualLondonMood
Mapsfor Advanced
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Seriously Capturing and Scraping Data: Twitter and online
streaming, London Bikes

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10953 Dratted cold snap has killed thecar battery..Â£70 for a newone...#uksnow

21/12/2009 22:53

pablothehat(pablothehat)

5788

Steady heavy snow in Chesham
HP5 #uksnow

21/12/2009 15:57

iotaMEDIA(Gordon O'Neill)5789#uksnow SG10 3/10

21/12/2009 15:57

domsparkes(domsparkes)

21 Dec2009

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6 Jan2010

Tweets Per Hour (#uksnow)

Run Movie

20 Dec2009

6 Jan201013 Jan2010

26 Jan2010

Tweets using the #uksnow tag shown as tweets (grey) and those containing a valid postcode (red)for Advanced
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#uksnow tweets: Wed 13 January 2010
Tweets using the #uksnow tag for
Wednesday 13th January 2010 plotted as acount by postcode for the whole day,compared to UKMO data for 12Z
0-4cm
5-9cm
10-14cm
15-19cm
20cm+for Advanced
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Tweets as Background Radiation about Dynamics in the City

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New YorkLondon

Paris

Moscow

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London

1000

100

Enfield10Colindale

11

Barking

10100

1000

10000

2.11800
1600

Heathrow2

Kingston
Croydon

1.9
1200
1000

1.8

800

1.76001.64001.5200Purley0

1.40481216

Time by 24 Hour Clockfor Advanced
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2024

Zipf Parameter

Number of Tweets

1400Scraping Data: The London Bikes Experiment
Locally called Boris’s Bikes
Essentially a scheme to introduce public bike transport tocentral London to take people out of cars and trains andeven buses and to promote sustainability, as well as
counter obesity
4200 bikes, 340
stations, access via
online registration orby paying on a credit
card at the local bikestation – so all online
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Ollie O’Brien in CASA has built an online resource toscrape the data continually – every few minutes ofdemand and supply of bikes – how full the bike stations
are. From this you can assess where there is space andwhere there is congestion
And he does this all the time, so if you log onto his web
site – his blog in fact

http://oobrien.com/vis/bikes/
Then you will get all this data – let me show you somepictures of it – I may even log on and show it now live
but it is slow in Explorer on this machineThis is a great example of a real time demand supply
management system which is powered by maps - OSM
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As yet no records of demand from people logging on, so no management capabilities,
but could happen probably from an App based software but maybe from the server
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2D to 3D: GIS to CAD and back and on the web
We are attempting
to integrate muchof this data withmore conventional
spatial information
And to constructand make thisavailable in various
kinds of multimedia
from 3-D GIS toCAD to movies tovirtual exhibition
spaces based on
virtual worlds

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The key issue for us is to populate this data base of 3.6 million building blocks withsocio-economic data
This is linking geometry to geography in a way that will explode the data base tolevels much more reminiscent of large scale databases in the physical sciences than
the rather modest social data bases based on aggregates of population
Linking these to individual address point data is another related issue too as well as
tagging buildings to populations
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From geometry to geography and back – populating
really large spatial data bases

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Dwellings
Address
Address
Address
Address
Address
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Adding Land Use, Transport and Populations and Aggregating Scales
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Part of this future is disseminating spatial data in
multimedia – games and virtual worlds

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Thanks, Any Questions?
Look at our web sites
http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/
http://www.surveymapper.com/
http://www.maptube.org/
http://www.oobrien.com/
Our Blogs
http://www.digitalurban.blogspot.com/
http://gisagents.blogspot.com/
http://www.genesis.ncess.ac.uk/

Credits

Andy Hudson-Smith, Ollie O’Brien, Richard Milton,
Steven Gray, Duncan Smith, Fabian Neuhaus
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