Eric Fischer has posted a new series of visualisations ‘Locals and Tourists’ depicting the location of photos taken in urban areas around the world. In this series he attempts to distinguish between those taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month) and those by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Intriguing.

What immediately struck me was his ingenious re-use of the existing data to create new information. By exploring individuals posted pictures over time he was able to hypothesise as to whether they were visiting or residing in a particular area. This allowed for a means to compare the gaze of the two groups.

I immediately started to explore his map of Dublin to see if any patterns emerged and then to try and suggest explanations for them. There is a healthy and regular mix of photos by both groups in the central core, but immediately to the east is a large blue box of photos taken by locals. It appears to surround the new Aviva Lansdowne Stadium in Ballsbridge. Additionally on the northside the National Botanical Gardens have a heavy concentration of photographs by locals.

The most practical application of Locals versus tourists is to consider how a visitor might use these visualisations to find the hidden city known only to its inhabitants — to find those secret spots worthy of capture by locals, but seemingly missed in the tourist guides.

This set builds on his earlier work ‘The Geotaggers’ World Atlas’ looking at from where the pictures were taken, whether from car, bicyle or when walking.

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Today’s gadget du jour is the Royaltek RGM-3800 GPS Receiver and Datalogger. I have long wanted to experiment with one of these and today one arrived in the post from the UK. It’s a small ticket item (€50), but after a short test here I am very, very impressed. A GPS datalogger is just like your fancy GPS car receiver that projects your track on an LCD screen with the difference being, there’s no screen, and it simply records your position to flash memory at regular intervals. You can then download the datafile to your computer and plot the data on a map using google maps or similar.

It arrived this morning and I popped the batteries into it. It’s not much of a test as I sit here in the office, but Matt had to go out to run some errands and I asked if he would take it with him. I installed the software (Windows only unfortunately — Parallels to the rescue). The install was smooth and the device was recognized immediately. I access it and changed to logging interval to 15 seconds. The device itself is about half the size of a current mobile phone. It is powered by two AA batteries which supposed allow it to fill the memory a few times.

So Matt wandered off a hour ago and I he reports that the device did a cold start out in front of our office in 30 seconds and that the light remained solid for the bulk of his journey. When he returned to the office he handed me the device and I said well, we’ll see where you have been. I connected the supplied USB cable and started the data logger tool. It reported that the device was operating (and had maintained contact inside our office here — I guess our window is large enough). All I had to do was click to send the data file (tagged with date and time) to an NMEA folder on my drive. It immediately showed up in a Google map window as part of the application. Plug and play indeed — colour me impressed.

We looked at the path plotted on the map and he confirmed that it was surprisingly accurate. It appears that the first few readings as it was getting a first fix were a little off, but it quickly got a decent accuracy. It actually seems to have tracked him crossing Pembroke to visit the ATM at the Ulster Bank and when he went inside and to the counter at the pharmacy around the corner. He spent about 45 minutes in the Grafton Barber and it seems to have been taking readings the whole time and getting some variance. By and large however and lacking an augmentation, the wee thing is quite acceptable accurate. I am looking forward to some further testing. One of the uses I was hoping to put this to was as a dongle on a knapsack when I go biking as a means of tracking routes and determining distance and velocity. You can set device parameters to track altitude and velocity in addition to long and lat should you want to. The supplied software also comes with a photo tagger that will coordinate the addition of geo-reference information to a series of jpgs from you camera after a day of shooting. So far, very impressive.

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Faced with finding a place to live in Dublin, I decided to quickly attempt to create a mashup of potential properties mapped throughout the city. This is, I sense, an increasingly common sort of mashup. But when I did a quick scan, I couldn’t find anything that accomplished this for the area I wanted. Yes, you could plot each place manually in either the My Maps section of Google Maps or create a KML overlay for Google Earth. Viable, but I wanted a tool that would allow the list to be dynamically generated and capture the list current to when I was looking at it. I would note that many sites have their own spatial displays, and there are a lot of mashups involving craigslist, but none for me and the Dublin scene. The site I was using to look for rental opportunities is daft.ie. It’s got a great search engine, and it will map your selections on a rental by rental basis, or will present all (unfiltered) listings in the area of the listing you have chosen. You can additionally select a particular agency and have their listings plotted on a Google Map, but this was not quite what I wanted. My objective was to create a custom search, take the detailed results, identify the location, geocode it, and then pipe it into Google Maps. In concept simple — in practise subject to the vagaries of daft and the tools used.

So, what tools do we need to build such a map without worrying about code?:

• Daft.ie for data
• Dapper.com to create a dynamic RSS feed
• Yahoo Pipes to geocode and output a further feed
• Yahoo Maps because that’s what Pipes works with

The first step is to construct the target properties from daft.ie. To do this, use their search form and have it return a paged series of search results matching your criteria. I have not been able to crack their paging code and am limited to the default 10 results per page. I tried to aggregate the paged results in Dapper, but to no avail. The work around for this is to create an account on daft and have it add listings to this as they are created. Viewing the My Daft page then provides non-paged view of your properties and gives the data (albeit in a relatively unstructured form) needed to build a custom feed from.

The next step is to log into your Dapper account and make a new Dapp. For those who have not used Dapper, it allows you to take unstructured data on a web page and turn it into structured data through some pattern matching exercises. It’s entirely graphical and calls for no knowledge of what’s going on behind the scenes. What you do is choose example pages containing the data you want to grab, teach Dapper how to recognize different types of data, provide this data with descriptors and then choose the format for the resulting structured data. Dapper is very slick and consistently reliable.

I pointed Dapper at ‘My Daft’ and it displayed the page with a list of target properties. I clicked on all the location phrases for each entry and then told it that these contained location info. I added separate fields for details about the property, a picture, the contact number and most importantly — the price. Once satisfied with the constructed feed, I told Dapper I wanted this as a public filtered RSS feed. Dapper then provides a custom URL containing this information linked back to the original source. Thus, when new things are added at the Daft end, they are picked up by Dapper and fed through to our next step.

Armed with a feed of structured data I turned to Yahoo PIpes to pick out the locational information, geocode this and plot it on a map. Yahoo Pipes provides a graphical editing environment into which you drag objects that represent your input, the operations you perform on this input and the way in which you want to view the output. So, I chose a URL feed input widget and pointed it at the custom Dapper feed. Now I have the property information flowing in from Daft. I then choose the widget ’ location extractor’ that will scan any feed and attempt to locate geospatial references. In this case, I don’t even have to specify that the locational information is enclosed by a <location> bracket. When it finds this information, it then attempts to geocode it. Thus if we supply a location of “Long Boat Quay North, Sir Rogerson Quay, Dublin Ci, Dublin 2, Dublin City Centre — Apartment to let” it will take the information, access a geocoding service and return a longitude and latitude: 53.339688,-6.216545. This is very cool. Note that it is not stripping out information, but adding new information to the existing property reference. Now we can point this output at a map and each packet of information is plotted using the precise spatial information that has been determined. Working in Yahoo PIpes is quite cool. The graphical editor allows you to pipe your information between sources and operators by dragging pipes between them. Great for visual thinkers.

When you run the Yahoo Pipes, it pulls all these pieces together and presents a map cleverly dotted with pinpoints indicating the properties that you are interested in. Clicking on any property marker then brings up the details about that property. This works very well, but its not perfect and some times the geodcoder simply can’t find the location from the text provided. Sometimes it also guesses rather badly and you can end up with a property marker on the other side of the world. However, it works in most cases and gives you a great up to the minute view of rental opportunities meeting your search criteria in the city of choice.

A next step would be to start to provide some logic to deal with locations which cannot be geocoded. It might also be useful to colour the pins by price range, number of bedrooms, etc. This is all accomplishable within PIpes once we have this great custom feed coming from Dapper/Daft.

If you would like to experiment further with map mashups, here’s a couple good references:
Erle, Schuyler and Rich Gibson, Google Maps Hacks, O’Reilly, 2006 — 0–596-10161–9
Lewis, Andre, Michael Purvis, Jeffrey Sambells and Cameron Turner, Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax From Novice to Professional , Apress, 2007 — 1–59059-787–7
Lenssen , Philipp, Google Apps Hacks, O’Reilly, 2008 — 978–0-596–51588-1
Shu-Wai Chow, PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects, PAckt, 2007 — 978–1-847190–88-8

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The HKL Helsinki’s Public Transit has a moving, real time map of bus locations available via their website. Now that’s what the public wants to know. Where is my bus? Why its right there. That’s what real time GPS reporting is for. I love this. You can even click on the bus icon/number and choose to display its routes, the stops it makes and make the connection you need. You can even choose to ‘follow’ the bus and have the map scroll with its progress. It is most fun if you do this in satellite or hybrid view (note: the buses don’t run 24 hours, so if there are no buses on the map, they aren’t on the streets either, so check back later). Wouldn’t that be absolutely useful on a brand new iPhone …oops its Finland and I suppose that should be Nokia N95 ;-) (no comment on the fact that all the mainstream blogs felt compelled to echo each other when 29 June was announced as that release date — just barely avoiding going down that rant).

I wish the HSR Hamilton’s transit authority provided the same. There may well be other transit authorities now providing this real-time info, but this is the first one I have seen in action. Awesome! Yay Finland.

On a personal note, I find myself sitting staring at a chosen bus, watching it speed up slow down, stop and take on passengers. A decade ago I used to occasionally tune into one of the many traffic/weather cams that the Finns had on line. I particularly liked watching the border crossing to Russia. It was a virtual vacation, if only for a few minutes. This bus thing is strangely similar…the strange aspect being me and my fixation with this I am sure. Is this a form of escapism? The system also lets you do simple route planning by inputing start points and end points. I had to chuckle over the request to “write the address you seek,” its sounds so mystical and you know, this is some cool magic!

Updated: Just saw that the Google Blog just had an article on their interaction with transit systems. No link to Helsinki, nor to real time reporting that I can tell, but some additional discussion.

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Why are we fascinated with the intersection of time and space??

A couple posts this morning caused me to take a step back and consider this larger question. I am fascinated with the visualization of the relationship between time and space. I used GIS tools kludged to allow for change over time in my MA work on hotels in late 19thC Guelph. Things have since evolved in wonderfully new directions. Visualizations have become increasingly rich in animation, detail, and creative approaches to adding two non-flat, non-static dimensions to flat and static media
I was taking a look at outside-in’s blogger maps. They connect blog and traditional media coverage with a map to illustrate quantity and frequency of commentary in specific locales. Their map of Brooklyn buzz showing neighbourhood areas and the frequency of their mention in local blogs versus traditional media is actually quite stunning. At its simplest it is little different from the grandfather map of spatial representation of cholera outbreaks in London by Dr. John Snow. Snow however was able to pinpoint a particular well as the transmission means for the cholera outbreak. A direct link between reported cases and the day to day activities of the victims. The use of moving pie charts in the modern maps showing the balance between traditional versus blogged media is a great visualization choice. But does it tell us anything without understanding the context of what is being reported?
I have blogged previously on Kevin Lynch’s mental maps and their is a clear indication in the media map of a neighbourhood of spatial perception of a neighbourhood. This is also true in their blogger map of kottke.org, which provides a moving map mash-up of the individual locations of that Dan Kottke has blogged on. You can see his focus shift, but the subject of his focus is not entirely apparent, even with the smooth reference and citing of the stories below the map. The map also collects other references to this same location and charts the result. I am a little unsure as to why a spot reports 1 story by Dan and 9 stories by others and then gives him 25% of the pie, but I am sure they are measuring something subtly beyond my ken.

The concept of tracking conversation in and about specific locales is quite fascinating. I am not sure it is neighbourhood focused, and outside in is probably a good way to describe as this seems as much externally faced as internally interactive.

Does the ability to see time and space simply give us a God’s eye view and make us feel empowered? Tracking local blog activity about localities is very cool in concept. It’s putting some great data out there for us to consider in figuring out what we are actually witnessing. It’s very raw. Can we measure how these stories influence one another and start to gauge who is writing about what they read? More so, can we start to peg these stories to concrete action?

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One of the more intriguing social networking applications that I have been enjoying over the last year has been Plazes.com. I blogged about my initial experiences with this spatial addition to the social sphere. Plazes uses your cyberspace IP to place you in physical space. If you are at a previously defined Plaze, then you are pinpointed. If you have discovered a new place, you supply some info about the place, refine the location and it is stored for future reference. You can discover if there are other plazers in your nearby space or plazes that have been recommended and you can also get a Traze (a spatial and temporal indication of where you have been over time). You can also use your mobile phone to plaze yourself or to find nearby plazes. The system works, is a hoot to use and you can even provide a little map to your blog readers showing where you are in real time –-> see my own sidebar.

Last week, the Plazes folks opened up their final beta testing on a new version that will shortly appear. With the new version, not only can you identify your plaze to the world, you can also share information about what you are doing there– ala Twitter. Additionally you can add past plazes to your locations and indicate where you will be in the future. All of this is accomplished with little effort on your part and takes the social promise to a new level. The service is designed for arranging meet-ups, indicating wifi availability or a good restaurant amongst a circle of trust. It also feeds the current fascination with sharing your current emotions, locations, thoughts etc. with your friends and the world at large ( eg. Twitter, Facebook).

The spatial dimension fascinates me. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a real time moving map plazing your acquaintances with respect to your current plaze (this all presuming that you have friends that use Plazes). Imagine if you will a scalable map of your neighbourhood/world in which your friends are all pinpointed with a small bright object and their name or picture, all moving around like a radar display…oh the pursuit of omniscience (I guess it’s a matter of time before we all have embedded RFID ;-) I like the new Plaze and it opens up some new avenues to how I would consider benefiting from Plazes.

Hearkening to Kevin Lynch’s mental maps of personal perception of space, the ability to use Trazes (past record of where you have been, how long you have been there and what you have been doing) to learn more about your habits and how you arrange your time and define your space. Privacy factors aside and I admit that there are many, Plazes allows for learning as much about yourself as your friends.

ps. Had to also see how effectively this little ‘compose in Word and post directly to your blog’ function actually works. Nearly flawless as it turns out…just missed the more tag that I inserted…can probably escape that out to make it work.

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This one could also be called…another great time waster…but it is well done. FlickrVision uses streaming photo posts from Flickr that have locational references. It displays geo-referenced popups of the images as they are posted to Flickr. Hovering over a popup will display a large image of that photo for appreciation. If you are looking for the kooky, eclectic, or for the occasional flash of brilliance, check out the site. rather like StumbleUpon with a geo-twist.

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I have mentioned the Exhibit project out of the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Enviroments (SIMILE) lab at MIT. Their Timeline project was one that I immediately was interested in. It takes and XML of JSON feed and creates a graphical animated chronological timeline. I threw 450 events from the life of Napoleon at it for fun and was quite pleased with the results. A couple months back they introduced Exhibit which allows a user to quickly and efficiently display a JSON dataset in a variety of flexible formats including searchable tables, Goggle maps, and the Timeline format above. Or as they state:

Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.
It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.

The beauty of this scheme is that it is a client side framework and approachable by anyone wishing to share their data and requires little knowledge of javascript or the like. Its quite robust and extensible. In fact, over the past week, the developer added scattercharts to the mix and the framework continues to evolve very quickly. In fact, the developer has been soliciting comments on users needs for future development. There’s a very active development community growing around this product.

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Am trying out the Plazes service. I am still plugging away with it, but from what I can share, it has found me and I am here:

There you go. Have embedded same in my header, but like all the little baubles and doodads I have overloaded the header a bit. I will tweak with this, but kind of like the little locating service, as I am always very confused about where I am … now even I will know. What this pace for further mods.

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Johan HolmbergThe Probabilist has a very interesting way of looking at one’s lifepath. He describes a way in which we can <a href=“http://www.theprobabilist.com/topography-of-self-growth/ target=“_blank”>envision our self-improvement as a topographic map, or as he posits a topography of existence. His blog “links probability calculus with personal development,” and seems to do much more at times. The concept of seeing one’s lifepath from topographic perspective immediately suggests that if you can adopt this perspective, you can be in a position to appreciate numerous possible paths and trajectories rather than remaining focused and possibly trapped on a single linear route-based one. His example of envisioning oneself on a hill or plateau defined by current dietary or income-generating assumptions, but able to scan adjacent or even distant hills with differing definitions is quite apt. I now have a certain mental picture of myself on this vast schematic terrain…I wonder how you see your world after reading his thought-provoking article.

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