Once again, O'Reilly's Radar tips us to an interesting application of cell phone GPS data, this time to illustrate daily traffic activity in Rome.

Real Time Rome: Using Cellphones To Model a City's Movements

Posted: 02 Jul 2007 01:14 PM CDT

By Brady Forrest

MIT's Senseable City Lab is using cellphone data to model Rome's populations. The project is called Real Time Rome. It is an exhibit at architecture conference La Biennale di Venezia's show Global Cities (shown Sept 10 – Nov 19 2006).

There are descriptions about the exhibit from an MIT article about the exhibit:

Real Time Rome features seven large animations, projected on transparent plexiglass screens. One screen shows traffic congestion around the city, while another screen shows the exact movements of all the city's buses and taxis. Another screen is able to track Romans celebrating major events like the World Cup or the city's annual White Nights festival (Notte Bianca, which will happen on Sept. 9, the evening before the Biennale's architecture exhibition opening). Additional screens show how tourists use urban spaces and how cars and pedestrians move about the city.

and how the data was collected:

Ratti's team obtains its data anonymously from cell phones, GPS devices on buses and taxis, and other wireless mobile devices, using advanced algorithms developed by Telecom Italia, the principal sponsor of the project. These algorithms are able to discern the difference between, say, a mobile phone signal from a user who is stuck in traffic and one that is sitting in the pocket of a pedestrian wandering down the street. Data are made anonymous and aggregated from the beginning, so there are no implications for individual privacy.

This certainly would be a more cost-effective method of gathering traffic data for determining commute times. Imagine if predictive systems could prepare us for the onslaught of traffic from a baseball game just letting out by watching the fans head towards there care. Or let us know that a highway is about to be flooded by traffic from a side road. Would you put up with your location being (formally) tracked in exchange for this service?

[BBC via Data Mining]

Ninth Crime Mapping Research Conference

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/pittsburgh2007/index.html 

About the conference

The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial data analysis techniques have become prominent tools for analyzing criminal behavior and the impacts of the criminal justice system on society. Classical and spatial statistics have been merged to form more comprehensive approaches in understanding social problems from research and practical standpoints. These methods allow for the measurement of proximity effects on places by neighboring areas that lead to a multi-dimensional and less static understanding of factors that contribute to or repel crime across space.

The Ninth Crime Mapping Research Conference will focus on the use and development of methodologies for practitioners and researchers. The MAPS Program is anticipating the selection of key accepted presentations for further development of an electronic monograph on GIS, Spatial Data Analysis and the Study of Crime in the following year. Its purpose will be to demonstrate the fusing of classical and spatial analysis techniques to enhance policy decisions. Methods should not be limited to the use of classical and spatial statistics but also demonstrate the unique capabilities of GIS in preparing, categorizing and visualization of data for analysis.

The Crime Mapping Research Conference is about more than mapping crime locations. Participants will discuss a range of issues including policy decisions, research methods to identify and dispel hot spots, and other applied practice solutions. The conference is about the study of society and elements of mapping technology that contribute to both crime and justice.

Proceedings

Conference presentations and proceedings now available.

• Innovations in Contextual Data for Crime Mapping – Opening keynote by Dr. Andrew Reamer (Brookings Institution)
• Presentations

Agenda

The conference will include workshop and panel sessions, as well as some plenary sessions. One plenary session will be about the “Coming Wave of GPS”. The conference also includes a Map competition, Pre-conference workshops, and provides an excellent opportunity for researchers and practitioners to network with each other.

• List of panel presentations
• List of workshops

---

 

Once again, O'Reilly's Radar tips us to a fine posting related to JAGIS (Journalism and GIS), this one regarding the challenge of generating change-over-time in urban areas.

Stamen's Map for Trulia

Posted: 12 Jun 2007 12:22 AM CDT

By Brady Forrest

Trulia's new Hindsight Map is a beautiful, animated visualization of the development history of US cities and towns. With it, you can watch entire towns and cities grow. In Seattle, you can watch the city grow starting in year 1900. Trulia is a real estate search engine (much like Zillow). Stamen Design, known for their work on CabSpotting and in Digg Labs, built the map for Trulia using their new Flash mapping library, Modest Maps. Tom Carden and Shawn Allen of Stamen released and demoed Hindsight at Where 2.0.

Tom sent me the following notes on Hindsight and Modest Maps:

• The use of our Flash mapping library (Modest Maps) means we can change the brightness/saturation of the maps, so the data is easier to read
• The use of Flash 9 specifically means we can throw around *much* more data than is currently possible with AJAX approaches (thousands of points in real-time – none of the data is pre-rendered)… a Silverlight port of Modest Maps is in development, by the way
• The URL in the address bar always represents the place you're looking at, using the location fragment (hash), so links can be easily passed around by IM, email, blogs etc.
• The data coming from Trulia is ordered using a random number for each property, so we can always show a sample of properties when zoomed out, without having to do aggregated/generalized views of the point data (Trulia already do this well with their own heatmap product)
• The flash piece in the blog header grabs the blog's RSS feed and finds links to the visualisation – the lat/lon is in the URL – and plots them on the map
• Modest Maps is almost ready for a 1.0 release and we're keen to get people familiar with Flash development to test it out. There is code that's capable of loading Microsoft, Yahoo and Google map tiles as well as OpenStreetMap, NASA Bluemarble and more, for Flash and Flash Lite in Actionscript 2, Flash 9 and Flex in Actionscript 3, as well as an ongoing Microsoft Silverlight port.

Time has been one of the missing dimensions in online maps, but recently it has become a common thing to add. Outside.in (Radar post) recently added the fourth dimension with their ability to track geographic stories over time. Google Earth (info) added the ability to “play” GPS traces. Hindsight really has me wondering about the applications of time-phased maps beyond analysis. In situations like Katrina (See Mikel Maron's post on the maps of Katrina) and the Maze Meltdown (See SF Chronicle article on the Maze) where there are rapid changes to roads this would especially helpful. To get your mind around changes, you need to be able to compare. I wonder if we can expect this to come from the major portals.

Once again, O'Reilly's Radar tips us to a fine posting related to JAGIS (Journalism and GIS), this one regarding the challenge of generating change-over-time in urban areas.

Stamen's Map for Trulia

Posted: 12 Jun 2007 12:22 AM CDT

By Brady Forrest

Trulia's new Hindsight Map is a beautiful, animated visualization of the development history of US cities and towns. With it, you can watch entire towns and cities grow. In Seattle, you can watch the city grow starting in year 1900. Trulia is a real estate search engine (much like Zillow). Stamen Design, known for their work on CabSpotting and in Digg Labs, built the map for Trulia using their new Flash mapping library, Modest Maps. Tom Carden and Shawn Allen of Stamen released and demoed Hindsight at Where 2.0.

Tom sent me the following notes on Hindsight and Modest Maps:

• The use of our Flash mapping library (Modest Maps) means we can change the brightness/saturation of the maps, so the data is easier to read
• The use of Flash 9 specifically means we can throw around *much* more data than is currently possible with AJAX approaches (thousands of points in real-time – none of the data is pre-rendered)… a Silverlight port of Modest Maps is in development, by the way
• The URL in the address bar always represents the place you're looking at, using the location fragment (hash), so links can be easily passed around by IM, email, blogs etc.
• The data coming from Trulia is ordered using a random number for each property, so we can always show a sample of properties when zoomed out, without having to do aggregated/generalized views of the point data (Trulia already do this well with their own heatmap product)
• The flash piece in the blog header grabs the blog's RSS feed and finds links to the visualisation – the lat/lon is in the URL – and plots them on the map
• Modest Maps is almost ready for a 1.0 release and we're keen to get people familiar with Flash development to test it out. There is code that's capable of loading Microsoft, Yahoo and Google map tiles as well as OpenStreetMap, NASA Bluemarble and more, for Flash and Flash Lite in Actionscript 2, Flash 9 and Flex in Actionscript 3, as well as an ongoing Microsoft Silverlight port.

Time has been one of the missing dimensions in online maps, but recently it has become a common thing to add. Outside.in (Radar post) recently added the fourth dimension with their ability to track geographic stories over time. Google Earth (info) added the ability to “play” GPS traces. Hindsight really has me wondering about the applications of time-phased maps beyond analysis. In situations like Katrina (See Mikel Maron's post on the maps of Katrina) and the Maze Meltdown (See SF Chronicle article on the Maze) where there are rapid changes to roads this would especially helpful. To get your mind around changes, you need to be able to compare. I wonder if we can expect this to come from the major portals.

A recent post from the FreeGis group at Google. Looks to be a fine solution to a decade-old challenge.
—————
Free Toolbar available from the TerraGo download link. MAP2PDF provides an
easy to use and affordable solution for distributing GIS data to non-GIS users.
By leveraging Adobe Acrobat, GeoPDF as portable mapping format, allows for
the creation and publishing of layered Georegistered maps that can be accessed
at no cost by non-GIS users. – Sat 9 Jun 2007 15:21
1 message, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/freeGIS/t/9672fdc5d31e958b

Source: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/geocommons_shar.html

GeoCommons, Share Your GeoData

Posted: 23 May 2007 01:59 PM CDT

By Brady Forrest

GeoCommons
is a new mapping site that allows members to use a variety of datasets
to create their own maps. It provides the free geodata, a map builder
tool,the ability to create heat maps, and a map hosting site. An API
will be available shortly. GeoCommons comes from FortiusOne, a Washington, D.C. company. The public Beta is going to be releasedWhere 2.0's launchpad.
Monday, May 28th, at Where 2.0's launchpad.

When building a map you can use one of the 1500 data sets (with 2
billion data attributes) that they have made freely available. The data
sets vary widely and include things like “Identity Theft 2006”, “Coral
Reef Bleaching – Worldwide”, “Starbucks Locations – Worldwide”, and
“HAZUS – Seattle, WA – Resident Demographics”. As you can see below,
data can be viewed in a tabular format prior to loading it onto a map.
Data sets can be combined together so that you can see “The Prices of Living in NYC & SF” and “Barack vs. Clinton – Show Me the Money! ” — it seems to me that Barack has more widespread support.

We are finding O'Reilly's Radar an increasingly valuable site/blog to keep up with interesting developments in Web 2.0, publishing and the general Digital Revolution.  Brady Forrest's contribution below is an example.

See http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/trends_of_onlin.html

Trends of Online Mapping Portals

Posted: 21 May 2007 04:34 PM CDT

By Brady Forrest

Last week there were several announcements made that show the direction
of the online mapping portals. Satellite images and slippy maps are no
longer differentiators for attracting users, everyone has them and as I
noted last week there are now companies that have cropped up to service
companies that want their own maps. Some of these new differentiators
are immersive experiences, owning the stack, and data!

Immersive experience within the browser – A couple of weeks ago Google maps added building frames that are visible at street level in some cities. These 2.5D frames are very clean and useful when trying to place something on a street.

Now the Mercury News (warning: annoying reg required; found via TechCrunch) is reporting that these builds will soon be fully fleshed out.

The Mercury News has learned that Google has quietly
licensed the sensing technology developed by a team of Stanford
University students that enabled Stanley, a Volkswagon Touareg R5, to
win the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. In that race, the Stanford robotic
car successfully drove more than 131 miles through the Mojave Desert in
less than seven hours.

The technology will enable Google to map out photo-realistic 3-D
versions of cities around the world, and possibly regain ground it has
lost to Microsoft's 3-D mapping application known as Virtual Earth.

The license will be exclusive, but don't think Google
will be the only ones with 3-D in the browser. Microsoft has had 3-D
for a while now (unfortunately, it requires the .NET framework; my
assumption is that the team is busy converting it to SilverLight). 3-D
is going to become a standard part of mapping applications. The trick
will be making sure that the extra data doesn't get in the way of the
user's quest to get information. Buildings are slow to render and can
obscure directions.

This strategy is a nice compliment to their current strategy of
gathering and harnessing 3-D models from users. Currently these are
only available in Google Earth. The primary location to get them is
Google's 3D Warehouse. I suspect that we will start to see user contributed models on Google Maps.

No word on how many cities Google will roll out their 3D models in or when the new data will be available via their API.

Data, Data, & More Data – Until recently, search
engines did not provide neighborhoods as a way of searching cities.
Neighborhoods are an incredibly useful, if hard to define, method of
defining an area of a city.

Google has now added
neighboorhood data to their index, but they have not really done much
with it. If you know the neighborhood name then you can use that to
supplement searching a city. However, if you are uncertain or if you
are unaware of the feature, then you are SOL. There is no indication
that the feature exists, how widespread it is, or what the boundaries
of the neighborhood are. I hope that they continue to expand on this
feature.

Ask
on the other hand has done a great job with this feature (see above).
They surface nearby neighborhood names for easy follow-on searches (see
below). They show you the bounds of the neighborhood quite clearly.

Ask is using data from SF startup Urban Mapping. Urban Mapping claims
complete coverage of ~300 urban areas in the US and Canada (with Europe
coming). This isn't an easy problem. Urban Mapping has been working at
it for quite sometime and are known for having a good data set. They
have also been aggregating transit data. An interesting thing to note
is that many of the same neighborhoods available on Ask are also
available on Google maps (examples: Tenderloin, SF: Google, Ask; Civic Center, SF: Google, Ask)
No word yet if any of the other big engines are going to add
neighborhood data, but my guess is that it will soon become a standard
feature; it's too useful to not have.

Own the Stack – Until recently, Yahoo! used deCarta to handle creating directions (or routing). They have announced
that they have taken ownership of this part of the stack and have built
their own routing engine. Ask and Google still use deCarta. Microsoft
has always had their own. Yahoo! is hoping to make their new engine a
differentiator. In some ways this is analogous to Microsoft's purchase
of Vexcel, a 3D imagery provider. Microsoft did not want the same 3D data as Google Earth or any other search engine for its 3D world.

I think that any vendor servicing Google, Microsoft, Ask, Yahoo or
MapQuest will have to keep an eye on their next source of revenue.
Those contracts aren't going to necessarily last too long. The geostack
is too valuable to outsource.

There is only one part of the stack that I think *might* be to
expensive for any one of the engines to buy or build out right. That's
the street data and it's a data source primarily supplied by two
companies, NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. NAVTEQ has a market cap of 3.5 bilion dollars as of this writing; Tela Atlas has one of 1.4 billion pounds. These would be spendy purchases. Microsoft is currently working closely with Facet Technology Corporation to collect street data for cities to add a street-level 3D layer (see Facet's SightMap
for a preview), but this Facet is not collecting data to match the
other players. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo! parleys its partnershipOpenStreetMap into a data play.
with

A couple days before Christmas, Jesse Theodore — a writer at ESRI — interviewed Tom Johnson about the use of GIS in journalism.  That interview is now available as a podcast at http://www.esri.com/news/podcasts/audio/speaker/tom_johnson.mp3

No story?  Then check out Swivel, a web site rich with data — and the display of data — that you didn't know about and which is pregnant with possibilities for a good news feature.  And often a news feature that could be localized.

Here, for example, is a posting from the SECRECY REPORT CARD 2005  illustrating the changing trends in the the classification and de-classification of U.S. government data.  (You can probably guess the direction of the curves.)

Spotlight What is the US Government Not Telling Us?

Source: SECRECY REPORT CARD 2005

The
number of classified documents is steadily increasing, while the number
of pages being declassified is dwindling. This data were uploaded by mcroydon.