Gary Gale

Posts about teddington

An Independent Map for Independent People

Imagine for a moment you're in the city you live in; you know it like the back of your hand and yet you know there's shops, businesses or services nearby that you haven't yet come across. Or maybe you're in an unfamiliar city and you want to explore and stay away from the same old global brands that you see everywhere, in every city and on every street.

Now imagine putting this on a map.

"Ah hah!" you might say, reaching into your pocket and brandishing your smartphone. "I can do that easily" you say triumphantly as you fire up Google's or Apple's or HERE's mapping app.

But no, I'm talking about something a little more focused, a little less broad. "No worry" you say, firing up Foursquare, or Yelp or Facebook or TripAdvisor.

But the map I'm looking at right now, isn't anything like this. There's no national or global brands. There's just small, independent, probably quirky, businesses. And they're on a map. A real, tangible, hold in your hands and touch sort of map. It looks like this and it arrived on my door mat last week.

imc-package First impressions count and these first impressions are good. The Independent Map Co obviously has some serious design smarts going on but there's also a lovely little maps touch to the address label, with my home address's latitude and longitude on there as well (although I've pixelated this bit out, so you'll have to trust me on that point).

This is the first printed, tangible, map the the Independent Map Co has produced and it's for Liverpool, the home city of the founders. Sadly it's not a city I'm familar with although I'm assured that there's a London version coming soon. If first impressions are good, the packaging is even better. There care and attention to detail by the shed load going on here.

imc-wrapped Once you get to the map itself, it continues to impress. On one side is a list of the independent businesses, broken down into categories such as Escapes, Food & Drink and Evening amonsgt others. Each business has the usual contact details but there's also an obviously carefully written summary of the business and in keeping with the map and the packaging, there's the coordinates as well. This has got artisanal written all over it, but in a good way.

imc-listing On the other side is the map, the real map. There's love and attention to detail in the cartography. Everything is smooth and regular. The roads have been smoothed out and the muted colour scheme accentuates the red numbered map markers for the independent businesses. It's a map that whilst not geographically precise, allows you to focus on getting to where you want to go. It doesn't get in the way and provides the perfect backdrop for the key information you need in a map of this type; main roads, key points of interest and those red map markers. Even the scale bar is based in human terms; 4 squares on the faint graticule is approximately 5 minutes walks.

imc-cartography The form factor of the map hits the right note too. It's small enough to keep in a purse or bag for when you really need it. If I'm ever in Liverpool, I'm going to be sure to seek out an espresso from 53.402456°N, 2.976782°W, which is where Bold Street Coffee is located. In the meantime. I'm looking forwards to the London version to be produced so I can seek out some new coffee venues when I'm next up in the city and thanks to the map's web site I can do just that; the Espresso Room in Bloomsbury looks rather interesting.

Vagamente Maleducato; The Vaguely Rude Places Map Goes International

Vaguely Rude Places Map in February of 2013 I had no idea what was going to happen. Since then it's gone viral multiple times, been the subject of three conference talks, talked about on two radio stations, been covered in loads of newspapers and viewed millions of times. I still find it wryly amusing that the most successful map I've made to date has had nothing to do with my day job.

When I first made the Vaguely Rude Places Map in February of 2013 I had no idea what was going to happen. Since then it's gone viral multiple times, been the subject of three conference talks, talked about on two radio stations, been covered in loads of newspapers and viewed millions of times. I still find it wryly amusing that the most successful map I've made to date has had nothing to do with my day job.

vaguely-rude-redux

But two years is a long time in geo-technology and the original map just feels ... tired. So I decided it was time for a face lift and while I was at it, to incorporate the Italian version of the map that Simone Cortesi forked from the original one. Apparently places can be rude in languages besides (British) English.

So I reforked Simone's Italian version and updated the Rude Places map based on Bryan McBride's excellent Bootleaf. The resultant reworking of the map is now up and live and looks a whole lot slicker than the original did. Thanks to Bryan's code, it's now browsable and searchable and you can flick between the original set of English places and their Italian counterparts with a single click of the mouse or tap of the screen.

simone-cortesi-map

I've mentioned this before but sincere thanks and credit is due to the following people for helping make the map, both deliberately and inadvertently.

To paraphrase the late, great Terry Pratchett, sometimes making a map is the most fun you can have by yourself.

(P)rude(ntial) by Vladimer Shioshvili on Flickr, CC-BY-SA

Say "Hello" to CartoBot

Twitter account.

None is this is true. Sorry CartoBot, it's just not. Cartobot is a Twitterbot, written in Node.js, that searches for Tweets about maps and cartography and also scans my GetPocket queue for bookmarks tagged with maps and Tweets about these as well.

CartoBot is a small robot who lives in the office in my loft. He accidentally achieved consciousness when his charging cable was accidentally plugged into a Raspberry PI and he started to look for information. His only source was my library of books on maps and so CartoBot became obsessed with them. He now spends his days sitting on my home wifi connection and scouring the web for maps and mapping related stuff, which he Tweets about through his very own Twitter account.

None is this is true. Sorry CartoBot, it's just not. Cartobot is a Twitterbot, written in Node.js, that searches for Tweets about maps and cartography and also scans my GetPocket queue for bookmarks tagged with maps and Tweets about these as well.

cartobot

Why does CartoBot do this? Because I'd always wanted to write a Twitterbot and making one that Tweeted about maps and cartography seemed fitting. I'd also wanted to experiment with Node and this turned out to be a good excuse doing just that.

If you follow CartoBot on Twitter he won't follow you back and for now at least, if you Tweet to him he doesn't know how to reply. This may change in the future. But he will follow you if you Tweet about maps and use the #map, #maps or #cartography hash tags and he finds one of your Tweets and retweets it.

At the moment, CartoBot is sitting on one of my servers and waking up every 2 hours and searching for stuff. The search algorithm he uses is pretty simplistic and every so often throws up something totally inappropriate so should be considered very much a work in progress.

So far, he's Tweeted or retweeted just over 800 times and has over 500 followers. He doesn't take up any appreciable CPU, disk space or bandwidth, so CartoBot won't be going anywhere for the foreseable future. Let's see how this pans out.

Robbie The Robot: Into The Unknown by JD Hancock, CC-BY

Undiscovering the Mountains of Kong and the Mountains of the Moon

Quick, take a look at this map. There's something wrong with it. It's a map of the coast of West Africa dating from 1839. Compared with modern maps, a few things have changed. Senegambia was the French controlled Senegal and the British controlled Gambia, Soudan is today's Sudan and Upper Guinea is part of today's Guinea. But that's not what's wrong with this map. Take a closer look.

West_Africa_1839_Mitchell_map_-_Kong

Running along the border between Upper Guinea and Soudan is the Mountains of Kong. If the name of this mountain range doesn't seem familiar, then maybe the next map will help. Dating from 1805, this map by John Cary shows the Mountains of Kong marching eastwards from the western coast of Africa and linking up with the eastern Mountains of the Moon.

1805_cary

There's two major problems with these maps. Neither the Mountains of Kong or the Mountains of the Moon actually exist.

The Moutains of Kong first appeared on a map in 1798, based on explorations of the western coast of Africa by Mungo Park. This map, produced by Englishman James Rennell, showed the River Niger petering out and presumably evaporating in a region which is now Burkina Faso, rather than flowing some two and half thousand miles before joining the Atlantic Ocean via the Niger Delta in Nigeria. Quite why the mountains appeared on Rennell's map is still unclear. Mungo Park's expedition never ventured into the area where the mountains are shown.

The Mountains of the Moon were first reported around 50 AD by Diogenes, a Greek trader who claimed to have found the source of the River Nile after travelling inland from the city of Rhapta, a market city whose location is unclear but it believed to be in what is now Tanzania. Diogenes reported that the Nile rose from a range of snowy mountains, located near two great lakes. He named these snowy peaks the Mountains of the Moon. Today, his great lakes are thought to be Lake Victoria and Lake Nyassa and the Mountains of the Moon are probably the Rwenzori range on the border between Uganda the The Congo.

In the 1800's Africa was still mainly unexplored, which explains the unknown parts label on Cary's map and both the Mountains of Kong and The Mountains of the Moon were still believed to be very much in existence. Subsequent maps of the area continued to show them and through the course of several expeditions, the resultant maps not only continued to show the Kong range, but it actually increased in height and in length, eventually linking up with the equally fictitious Mountains of the Moon

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Despite no-one actually seeing this massive, continent spanning mountain range, belief in the Mountains of Kong continued for almost a century. Finally Louis Binger, a French explorer who spent two years from 1887 charting the path of the River Niger was able to prove that the mountain range simply didn't exist. Cartographer quickly took the hint and both mountain ranges vanished from subsequent maps of the area and of Africa ... almost.

The enduring myth of the Mountains of the Moon refuses to die out entirely. The 1928 edition of Bartholemew's Oxford Advanced Atlas still contained the range, albeit only in the index and placing them just south of the town of Korhogo in Côte d'Ivoire. The also had a fleeting reappearance in the 1995 edition of Goode's World Atlas.

Normally we think of the process of early map making as intrinsically linked to the process of discovery, at least from a European perspective, when we were discovering countries and places quite oblivious to the fact that people already lived there. But as the Mountains of Kong and the Mountains of the Moon show, sometimes to make a map you need to undiscover places as well.

With the Demise of Google Maps Engine, What Next For GME Users?

At the beginning of 2013 Google launched Google Maps Engine Lite, a simpler and easier to use version of their commercial Maps Engine, which was designed as a successor to Google's My Maps feature. In essence, My Maps and GME were web based, simplified GIS tools, allowing a user to create maps with overlays of their own data. Call it GIS for people who don't know about GIS if you will. Maybe GME never got the traction Google hoped for but they have now announced that GME will be shutting down in a year's time. What happens next for GME users and what alternatives are there? Who will benefit from the demise of GME?

There's 3 likely contenders to the throne of the GIS-lite approach of GME; ArcGIS Online, CartoDB and MapBox via their new Turf product.

There’s much irony here, given that GME was originally positioned as a web savvy alternative to traditional GIS platforms. Both Esri and Mapbox will need a significant advertising push and awareness campaign to attract GME emigres. CartoDB on the other hand is positioning itself as the official successor to GME with the launch of CartoDB for Google Maps Platform, apparently developed in conjunction with Google.

cartodb

I don’t think they’ll be any one winner and all of these wannabe successors to GME will likely benefit though CartoDB's official seal of Google approval will tip the balance in their favour.

But there other contenders here as well …

There's iSpatial, a Google Maps and Google Earth based product, which may make this attractive for people who want to continue the Google experience and look and feel.

The similarly named eSpatial is another Google Maps powered mapping platform with GME style functionality

At one end of the spectrum is uMap, an OSM based layering tool and platform, while pricier options include Maptitude and Mango.

Finally honourable mention should be made of Geojson.io, very much GeoJSON focused as the name suggests, but an easy visualisation tool for GeoJSON data.

Whilst these products may get some customers, they’ve already been competing with GME for users and for business, so I don’t see a massive uptake for these.

Finally of course, there’s Google themselves … users with some technical ability could replicate some of the functionality of GME with Google’s other maps and geo APIs and products.

While GME may be biting the dust, there's a whole host of alternatives available for users looking to emigrate from Google's platform and who will carry on visualising their spatial data, blissfully unable that they're actually using a GIS platform.

Dead End by Alan English, CC-BY-NA

How Did 2014's Geo Predictions Actually Work Out?

some predictions about where the maps, location and geo industry would go during the course of the year. That year has now passed, so I think it's time to revisit those predictions and see how inaccurate my crystal ball gazing really was.

In January of 2014, Atanas Entchev from GeoHipster asked me to make some predictions about where the maps, location and geo industry would go during the course of the year. That year has now passed, so I think it's time to revisit those predictions and see how inaccurate my crystal ball gazing really was.

Raster web map tiles aren’t going to go anywhere in 2014, but expect to see much more use of vector maps, both in consumer front ends, in open data sources and in development toolkits. The winning combination of Leaflet and D3 is but the beginning.

A successful prediction for vector maps I think. Yes, vectors are behind almost all the mobile map clients you see for reasons of speed and ease of customisation. But they're now appearing in mobile SDKs as well, such as HERE's, while MapBox have gone for a vector only approach with MapBox Studio, the successor to TileMill for designing custom cartographic styles.

Due to ever increasing licensing costs for base map data and corresponding reduced terms of use, at least one major maps destination site will either throw in the towel or go for a white labelled map platform deal; MapQuest I’m looking at you here.

If I'm feeling generous, I consider this a partial success. While MapQuest is still very much alive and kicking, over in the mobile world Samsung is a fully paid up member of the enemy of my enemy is my friend school of thought and in September 2014 joined forces with HERE Maps to try and show that maps on an Android phone don't have to be Google's maps.

We’re already seeing the stratification of the geo industry. We already have data-as-a-service (think Open Cage Data and GeoFabrik) and maps-as-a-service (hello MapBox). Next up will be imagery-as-a-service as companies such as Planet Labs and Skybox Imaging disrupt Digital Globe’s imaging hegemony.

Definitely a successful prediction. Skybox were acquired by Google in the middle of 2014 for a figure around the $500M mark. Meanwhile Planet Labs continues to grow. Despite loosing 26 imaging micro satellites in October of 2014, it managed to get a further 67 into orbit during the course of the year and rounded things off with a Series C round of funding to the tune of $95M.

More people will end up doing web-based GIS without actually knowing they’re doing web-based GIS. Think less of Esri’s ArcGIS Online and MapInfo’s Web GIS and much more of CartoDB.

Again, this prediction came to pass. Not content with going all in with vector based maps, MapBox also announced Turf, their GIS for web maps system just as 2014 was coming to a close.

Web based map re-workings of Harry Beck’s iconic London Underground map will die out and Ken Field will be a happy man.

A complete and utter failure of a prediction. It turns out that making your own version of the Tube map continues to be a popular pass time. A cursory search on Twitter for tube map shows 6 different Tube map variants before I got bored with scrolling downwards through the search results. The one saving grace is that Ken's own End of the Line Tube Map of Tube Maps shows no sign of getting stale for want of a lack of updates.

So by my reckoning, out of 5 predictions my end of year report card stands at 3.5 out of 5 .. 3 correct predictions, 1 abject failure of a prediction and 1 which is half right and so it's also half wrong.

I wonder if that score can be beaten for 2015 ... ? Which is fitting segue into my next post.

Old Globe by Kenneth Lu, CC-BY

Welcome To The Republic Of Null Island

Republic of Null Island (like no place on earth) says this about the island's location ...

The Republic of Null Island is one of the smallest and least-visited nations on Earth. Situated where the Prime Meridian crosses the Equator, Null Island sits 1600 kilometres off the western coast of Africa.

... but Null Island is an in joke created by Nate Kelso and Tom Patterson as part of the Natural Earth data set in January 2011.

In English, null means nothing, nil, empty or void. In computing, null is a special value for nothing, an empty value. In geography, null tends to be what you get when you've been unable to geocode a place or an address and haven't checked the geocoder's response. What you end up with is a pair of coordinates of 0 degrees longitude and 0 degrees latitude, a point somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, south of Ghana and west of Gabon. It's here that you'll also find Null Island, if you look hard enough.

The website for the Republic of Null Island (like no place on earth) says this about the island's location ...

The Republic of Null Island is one of the smallest and least-visited nations on Earth. Situated where the Prime Meridian crosses the Equator, Null Island sits 1600 kilometres off the western coast of Africa.

... but Null Island is an in joke created by Nate Kelso and Tom Patterson as part of the Natural Earth data set in January 2011.

null-island

It's totally fictitious and is designed as a gentle poke in the ribs for people who don't check the return value from their geocoder and end up putting a pin on a web map in the middle of the ocean. As Natural Earth's release notes mention ...

WARNING: A troubleshooting country has been added with an Indeterminate sovereignty class called Null Island. It is a fictional, 1 meter square island located off Africa where the equator and prime meridian cross. Being centered at 0,0 (zero latitude, zero longitude) it is useful for flagging geocode failures which are routed to 0,0 by most mapping services. Aside: “Null Islands” exist for all local coordinate reference systems besides WGS84 like State Plane (and global if not using modern Greenwich prime meridian). Null Island in Natural Earth is scaleRank 100, indicating it should never be shown in mapping.

Look carefully enough, especially on web sites that handle large amounts of data from third parties and which helpfully supply a map for some additional context, such as property sites, who should really know better and Null Island may just appear before your eyes.

the-link

Take Whathouse.com for example, who have a 3 bedroom property near Enfield in North East London for sale, yours for just £995,000. Whathouse helpfully provide a map tab on their property listings to that if you're not familiar with where the N9 postal district of London is, you can find out.

the-link-map

This is in London, the capital of the United Kingdom, which as far as I know hasn't suffered massive continental drift to end up in the middle of the ocean.

the-link-map-zoomed

Zoom the map out and you can see why this unique property seems to be alone in the middle of the ocean; it's really on Null Island. Either that or someone hasn't been checking their geocoding results properly. A bad geocoding result is almost probably definitely the reason for this little geographic faux pas, but a part of me likes to think that Null Island really does exist and you really can spend close to a million pounds securing a 3 bedroom apartment on one of geography's most tongue in cheek places.

Cartography, The Musical

I like maps. Even if you've never read posts on this site, the name "Mostly Maps" should probably be a giveaway. What you may not know is that I don't really like musicals. Now granted I've seen Rent and Spamalot, but that's because Alison and I were in New York and the former was recommended by one of my best friends and for the latter I'm a massive Python fan. Maps and musicals aren't something that go together. But that may be about to change.

Cast your mind back to the dawn of history, before mobile phones were smart and when GPS was just an Australian rugby club, which is sometime in the very early 2000's. If you lived in London, your essential navigation guide wasn't a maps app, but a copy of the A-Z as the Geographer's A-Z Street Atlas was better known. This was the map you carried around London rather than a mapping app on your phone. I still have several editions on the bookshelf at home, each one being bought when its predecessor got so dog eared as to be unusable or just started falling apart.

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The probably apocryphal backstory is that the A-Z's founder, Phyllis Pearsall got lost in 1935 following a 1919 Ordnance Survey map on the way to a party and decided to make her own map. To do this she got up at 5.00 AM and spent 18 hours a day walking the 3,000 odd miles of London's 23,00 or so streets. This tale is disputed, with Peter Barber, the British Library's Head Of Maps, being quoted as saying "The Phyllis Pearsall story is complete rubbish, there is no evidence she did it and if she did do it, she didn’t need to". Given that Pearsall's father was a map maker who produced and sold maps of London, he's got a point.

But regardless of the accuracy of the legend around Phyllis Pearsal, it's a great story, especially for those of us who used the A-Z each and every day around London. But is it a musical story? Neil Marcus, Diane Samuels and Gwyneth Herbert seem to think so and they're the team behind The A-Z Of Mrs. P, a musical about London's iconic street atlas and its founder that's currently playing at the Southwark Playhouse. Reviews have been mixed, but anything that throws some attention on the A-Z is welcome in my book, even if it is a musical.

A-ZofMrsP

You may have noticed that at the foot of each post I always try to provide source and attribution for photos or images that I use. I think I'm going to have to expand this to include the inspiration for each post. In this particular case, credit is due to Alison. If it's not a sign of true love when your wife texts you to tell you about something map related she's seen, then I don't know what is. I guess you don't spend nearly 15 years being married to a self professed map nerd without knowing a good map related story when you see one.

The A-Z Of Mrs. P poster by Su Blackwell.

In India Just Because You Can Map Something, Doesn't Always Mean You Should

prohibited places, although this practice has been effectively stopped due to the widespread availability of satellite imagery. Further afield, there's contested borders and territorial disputes which makes mapping some administrative boundaries something of a challenge; a proof of the old adage about pleasing some people some of the time but not all people all of the time.

It's easy to think that not mapping an area is a thing of the past. That we can and should map everywhere. That mapping is simply the combination of human effort, a bit of technology and a lot of data. Indeed OpenStreetMap's beginner's guide states upfront that the data you add improves the free world map for everyone. But as I found out, in India, there's a lot more subtlety and nuance behind this admirable creed.

Firstly there's the act of mapping itself. As with pre-Cold War Britain (and to be fair, some parts of Britain today), India has placed restrictions on what can and cannot appear on a map. When working for Nokia's HERE Maps, I ran a program to use crowd mapping to improve the company's maps in India and came across these restrictions first hand. My point here is not to agree or disagree with a government's stance on mapping restrictions but merely to point out that they exist.

It's easy to get stuck in a mental rut, to think that everyone thinks and feels the same way you do about a subject. But sometimes you need to get away and visit another country and another culture to find out that maybe there's more than one way of looking at a subject. For me that subject is, unsurprisingly, maps and the other country was India.

Some countries are easier to map than others. Up to the end of the Cold War, it was commonplace for the UK's Ordnance Survey to not show prohibited places, although this practice has been effectively stopped due to the widespread availability of satellite imagery. Further afield, there's contested borders and territorial disputes which makes mapping some administrative boundaries something of a challenge; a proof of the old adage about pleasing some people some of the time but not all people all of the time.

It's easy to think that not mapping an area is a thing of the past. That we can and should map everywhere. That mapping is simply the combination of human effort, a bit of technology and a lot of data. Indeed OpenStreetMap's beginner's guide states upfront that the data you add improves the free world map for everyone. But as I found out, in India, there's a lot more subtlety and nuance behind this admirable creed.

Firstly there's the act of mapping itself. As with pre-Cold War Britain (and to be fair, some parts of Britain today), India has placed restrictions on what can and cannot appear on a map. When working for Nokia's HERE Maps, I ran a program to use crowd mapping to improve the company's maps in India and came across these restrictions first hand. My point here is not to agree or disagree with a government's stance on mapping restrictions but merely to point out that they exist.

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But it's not just the government who would prefer you not to map places, it's the people as well in some cases. According to recent figures, India has a population of around 1.27 billion people; of these, over 65 million live in slums. Sadly this wasn't a shock; I'd been well prepared for slums from my visit to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania at the end of 2012.

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In Dar es Salaam, you map slums to help the occupants find vital facilities; fresh water, sanitation, health care and so on. You use the map to bring the slum to the authorities attention so they do something about it. Making a map is vital. But not necessarily so in India. Indian slums are hidden in plain sight. Everyone knows they're there, but they don't always bring attention to themselves. Putting a slum on the map runs the risk of bringing some potential prime real estate land to the attention of an unscrupulous property developer; some of whom have been known to raze a slum to the ground overnight and displacing the residents through the judicious use of bulldozers.

Another subtlety that doesn't apply in the United Kingdom are the locations of the Cheel Ghar in Indian cities, which translates to Tower of Silence in English. These are the circular raised structures where Parsi followers of the Zoroastrian faith leave their dead and let exposure to the sun and birds of prey reduce the body to bare bones. Originally these towers were outside the boundaries of the city, but the rapid growth of India's metropolitan areas have engulfed the Cheel Ghar, leaving them as small forested oases inside the urban sprawl. Even if you know where they are, and I walked past one without knowing it until it was pointed out to me, putting these sacred places on a map would not be deemed acceptable by adherents of that faith. Just because you can map something, doesn't always mean you should.

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But even if you make an accurate and detailed map, how do you cope with the vagaries and eccentricities of the Indian addressing system? I asked someone at the GeoMob meets GeoBLR meetup we ran in Bangalore how they'd geocode (turn addresses into longitude and latitude) a batch of a thousand or so addresses. The answer was blunt and succinct ... "Geocode that many addresses? We wouldn't". There's a long running joke in India to effect that the country does has GPS, but it doesn't stand for Global Positioning System, instead it stands for General Populace System. You look at an address, get to the nearest spot and then ask someone, repeating the process until you reach your destination.

Given how visual and landmark based Indian addresses are, this approach makes a lot of sense. In India I stayed at 3 different hotels in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. In Delhi, the address was Ring Road, New Delhi; in Mumbai it was Western Express Highway, Santacruz East and in Bangalore Swami Vivekananda Road, Off M.G. Road, Ulsoor. Standing outside each hotel and looking around, the addresses made a lot of sense, in Bangalore I was just off the M.G Road, named after Mahatma Gandhi; there's a lot of M.G. Roads in India, the equivalent of High Street in Britain. Other addresses include location clues such as near, opposite and by. If you really, really need to geocode an address you look it up on a digital map and make a note of the coordinates; a very manual and not at all scalable way of dealing with the problem.

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Reading all of the above back to myself before I click on Publish makes me realise that in hindsight it's blindingly obvious that each country will have its own set of edge cases. India is no exception. A massive amount of credit for what I learned in India should go to Sajjad, Sumandro and Kaustubh, the team behind Bangalore's GeoBLR geo themed meetup. Thank you all, you taught me a massive amount and expanded my horizons considerably.

Tower of Silence (for Parsi Sky Burial): Mumbai by James Oleson on Flickr.

The London Underground Strike Map

list of closed stations that are on Transport for London's website and try and work out quite how, if at all, you're going to get to where you want to be. Or you could look at a map.

This map. Now why didn't TfL think of doing this?

tube-strike-map

Strike map by Ian Visits on Flickr.

If you're trying to get out and about in London today you've probably noticed that the Tube is on strike. Again. You could read the list of closed stations that are on Transport for London's website and try and work out quite how, if at all, you're going to get to where you want to be. Or you could look at a map.

This map. Now why didn't TfL think of doing this?

tube-strike-map

Strike map by Ian Visits on Flickr.

Gazing Into The Geo Crystal Ball For 2014

Atanas Entchev, who together with Glenn Letham are the duo behind the intriguing GeoHipster, got in touch to ask me to do some crystal ball gazing and predict what's in store for the geo industry in 2014.

You can and should read all of the 10 other predictions as part of what will be HOT in geo in 2014 — predictions from the GeoHipster crowd, but here's what the geo crystal ball divulged to my gazing ...

Predictions are easy to get right. After all, look at DEC’s Ken Olsen when he said in 1977 that “there’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home”.

In the closing days of 2013, Atanas Entchev, who together with Glenn Letham are the duo behind the intriguing GeoHipster, got in touch to ask me to do some crystal ball gazing and predict what's in store for the geo industry in 2014.

You can and should read all of the 10 other predictions as part of what will be HOT in geo in 2014 — predictions from the GeoHipster crowd, but here's what the geo crystal ball divulged to my gazing ...

Predictions are easy to get right. After all, look at DEC’s Ken Olsen when he said in 1977 that “there’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home”.

539w

No. Wait. Predictions are hard. But throwing caution and any shred of professional integrity I have to the wind, here’s my predictions for the geo industry in 2014.

Raster web map tiles aren’t going to go anywhere in 2014, but expect to see much more use of vector maps, both in consumer front ends, in open data sources and in development toolkits. The winning combination of Leaflet and D3 is but the beginning.

Due to ever increasing licensing costs for base map data and corresponding reduced terms of use, at least one major maps destination site will either throw in the towel or go for a white labelled map platform deal; MapQuest I’m looking at you here.

We’re already seeing the stratification of the geo industry. We already have data-as-a-service (think Open Cage Data - [disclaimer; I'm an advisor to Open Cage Data] and GeoFabrik) and maps-as-a-service (hello MapBox). Next up will be imagery-as-a-service as companies such as Planet Labs and Skybox Imaging disrupt Digital Globe’s imaging hegemony.

4768742274_9125effc71_b

More people will end up doing web-based GIS without actually knowing they’re doing web-based GIS. Think less of Esri’s ArcGIS Online and MapInfo’s Web GIS and much more of CartoDB.

Web based map re-workings of Harry Beck’s iconic London Underground map will die out and Ken Field will be a happy man.

Finally, this is less of a prediction and more of a plea. Will someone please please bring to market a low powered, always on GPS unit that I can fit in my pocket and that has sufficient onboard storage to carry at least a day’s worth of GPS traces. It can’t be that difficult can it?

Ken Olsen picture courtesy of the Boston Globe, Crystal Ball image by Scott Kublin.

Farewell Ovi, Nokia And HERE; It's Time To Open The Next Door

I left the Geo Technologies group at Yahoo! and departed from a very Californian large company to take up a new role with a very Finnish large company called Nokia. Though Nokia started life as the merger between a paper mill operation, a rubber company and a cable company in the mid 1800's, by the time I joined Nokia it was best known for mobile and smart phone handsets and the software that makes these ubiquitous black mirrors work.

In addition to mobile data connectivity, apps and GPS, one of the things that defines a smartphone is a maps app and the suite of back-end platforms that drive that app as well as all of the other APIs that enable today's smartphone location based services. Just as TomTom acquired digital map maker Tele Atlas in 2008, Nokia had acquired rival maps provider NAVTEQ in 2007, putting in place the foundations for Nokia's maps and turn-by-turn navigation products, part of the company's Ovi brand of internet services.

This may be a personal foible but when I join a new company I mentally set myself two targets. The first is what I want to achieve with that company. The second is how long it will take to achieve this. If you reach the first target then the second is a moot point. But if the first target doesn't get reached and your self allocated timescale is close to coming to an end, then it's time to take stock.

Sometimes you can extend that timescale; when reaching your achievement target is so so close and you can be happy to stretch those timescales a little. Sometimes though this just doesn't work, not necessarily for any reason of your own making. Large companies are strange beasts and a strategic move which is right for the company may not align with your own targets and ideals.

In 2010, I left the Geo Technologies group at Yahoo! and departed from a very Californian large company to take up a new role with a very Finnish large company called Nokia. Though Nokia started life as the merger between a paper mill operation, a rubber company and a cable company in the mid 1800's, by the time I joined Nokia it was best known for mobile and smart phone handsets and the software that makes these ubiquitous black mirrors work.

In addition to mobile data connectivity, apps and GPS, one of the things that defines a smartphone is a maps app and the suite of back-end platforms that drive that app as well as all of the other APIs that enable today's smartphone location based services. Just as TomTom acquired digital map maker Tele Atlas in 2008, Nokia had acquired rival maps provider NAVTEQ in 2007, putting in place the foundations for Nokia's maps and turn-by-turn navigation products, part of the company's Ovi brand of internet services.

IMG_1559

I spent the first 18 months of my time with Nokia commuting weekly from London to Berlin, where the company's maps division was based. The pros of this weekly commute of almost 600 miles each way was rapid progression through British Airway's frequent flyer program, getting to know the city of Berlin really well and developing deep and lasting friendships with my team, who were behind the Ovi Places Registry, but more about them in a moment. The cons were living out of hotels on a weekly basis and the strain it placed on my family back in London.

IMG_0593

In 2011, Nokia pivoted its strategy as a result of new CEO Stephen Elop's infamous Burning Platform memo. The company's NAVTEQ division finally started to be integrated into Nokia, resulting in the rebranding of Ovi Maps to HERE Maps, by way of a brief spell as Nokia Maps and just before we were ready to ship the next major revision of the Places Registry, effectively powering all the data you see on a map which isn't part of the base map itself, the project was shelved in favour of NAVTEQ based places platform. This was probably the right thing to do from the perspective of the company, but it had a devastating effect on my Berlin based team who had laboured long and hard. The team was disbanded; some found new roles within the company, some didn't and were laid off and after spending several months tearing down what I'd spent so long helping to create, an agonising process in itself even though it was the right thing to do, I moved to help found the company crowd mapping group, driving the strategy behind the HERE Map Creator product. Think of a strategy not dissimilar to OpenStreetMap or Google Map Maker, only with a robust navigation grade map behind it.

Gary-Gale

All of which is merely a prelude to the fact that after almost 4 years with Nokia I've been taking stock and it's time to move on. The door marked Nokia, Ovi and HERE is now closed and it's time to look to the next adventure in what could loosely be termed my career. The metaphor of doors opening and closing seems fitting as Ovi just happens to be the Finnish word for door.

There's been a lot of high points over the past 4 or so years. Launching Nokia's maps and location platform at the final Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Negotiating the places section of Nokia's first strategic deal with Microsoft in a meeting room set against the amazing backdrop of Reykjavik in the depths of an Icelandic winter. Judging the World Bank's Sanitation Hackathon in Dar es Salaam.

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But most of the high points have been people.

Someone who leads a team is only as good as the team and in the original Ovi Places Registry team and the subsequent Nokia Places team I found an amazing group of individuals, who made a roving Englishman feel very much at home in Berlin.

There's also been a lot of lows over the past 4 years, but I don't want to go into them here.

Instead, I want to close the door on the Nokia chapter with a brief mention to five people who made my time in Berlin so rich and rewarding. There's Aaron Rincover, HERE's UX lead, who taught me so much about the user experience in a relatively short period of time. There's also four members of the Places Registry team, Enda Farrell, Jennifer Allen, Mark MacMahon and Jilles Van Gurp, who made me welcome in a new city, who it was an absolute pleasure to work with and who will, I hope, remain close friends. Enda and Jennifer are still both at HERE as Senior Technical Architect and Product Manager and a damn fine ones at that. Mark and Jilles were amongst those who moved on when the Places team was disbanded and are now the founders of LocalStream. Thank you all of you.

So where next? My last two companies have been large multinational affairs, but to open 2014 I'm looking to keep things a lot smaller and more agile. I'm going to take some time to do some freelance consulting, still in the maps, location and geo space of course; this industry continues to grow and innovate at an astounding rate, why would I want to work anywhere else?

For the first quarter of 2014 I'm going to be joining London's Lokku, consulting for them as their Geotechnologist in Residence. Since 2006, Lokku have built up an impressive portfolio of geospatial and geotechnology assets under the lead of Ed Freyfogle and Javier Etxebeste, both alumni of Yahoo! like myself. Through the success of their Nestoria and Open Cage Data brands and the #geomob meetup, Lokku are in a great position to take their expertise in open geospatial data, OpenStreetMap data and open geospatial platforms to the next level. My role with Lokku will be to help them identify where that next level will be and what it will look like. It's going to be a refreshing change to move from the world of a large corporate, with staff ID badges and ID numbers to a world where everyone fits into the same, albeit large, room and where everyone literally knows everyone else. So say I'm excited by this challenge would be a massive understatement. If you want to know more about Lokku, check out their blog, Twitter feed or come and say hello.

As for the rest of 2014 and beyond, it's time to follow up on all those conversations that you tend to have about the next great thing in maps and location. Who knows precisely where 2014 will take me, but no matter where, it's going to be geotastic and I can't wait.

Big Arrows And Beacons; Navigating Across The United States By Plane In The Pre-GPS Era

VHF Omni Directional Radio Range, shortened to VOR, hasn't been invented yet. LFR, or Low Frequency Radio Range, hasn't been invented yet. How do you hope to stay on course?

As a pilot you'd have a compass, an altimeter and maybe a map of the railway system to help you navigate and this is just what pilots did from 1918 when the U.S. Postal Service introduced the U.S. Air Mail system. But you needed one critical thing to help you navigate, one thing that wasn't available 24 hours a day. You needed daylight.

In 1921, an experimental night flight was successfully completed using the clever solution of following bonfires along the length of the route between Chicago and North Platte in Nebraska. The bonfires were lit and tended by Postal Service employees and the occasional helpful farmer.

It's the mid-1920's and you're in a plane trying to navigate your way across the vastness of the United States. GPS hasn't been invented yet. VHF Omni Directional Radio Range, shortened to VOR, hasn't been invented yet. LFR, or Low Frequency Radio Range, hasn't been invented yet. How do you hope to stay on course?

As a pilot you'd have a compass, an altimeter and maybe a map of the railway system to help you navigate and this is just what pilots did from 1918 when the U.S. Postal Service introduced the U.S. Air Mail system. But you needed one critical thing to help you navigate, one thing that wasn't available 24 hours a day. You needed daylight.

In 1921, an experimental night flight was successfully completed using the clever solution of following bonfires along the length of the route between Chicago and North Platte in Nebraska. The bonfires were lit and tended by Postal Service employees and the occasional helpful farmer.

airway-beacon

Having proved that a regular, day and night, postal service was possible, starting in 1923 a system of beacons were built across the United States. Each beacon was a 51 foot tall tower, one every 10 miles, with a massive rotating lamp on top that could be seen up to 40 miles away. Additional lights of differing colours pointed the two directions of the route and another light flashed out the beacon's identifier, in Morse code.

air-beacon-shelbyville

All of which was essential during the hours of darkness, but to help during daylight hours, each beacon was built on top of, or alongside, a massive concrete arrow, 70 feet in length, painted bright yellow, that pointed out the direction to the next beacon.

In their heyday, almost 1,500 beacons were built between 1923 and 1933. This navigation system continued despite the invention of Low Frequency Radio Range navigation in 1929. The last beacon was supposed to be shut down as late as 1973 but some are still in use in Western Montana.

While the beacon towers themselves are mostly long gone, many of the concrete arrows still remain and can be seen clearly from the satellite imagery that we now expect to accompany today's GPS driven digital maps. The arrows may lack their trademark yellow paint as age and weathering take their toll and in a lot of cases the next beacon that they pointed to has vanished under a new development.

air-beacon-hurricane

There's an oddly pleasing sense of continuity that a navigation aid from the pre-GPS era is still visible in the maps we now take for granted.

Air beacon courtesy of the United States Federal Aviation Administration, map imagery courtesy of Google Maps.

Making Maps The Hard Way - From Memory

Maybe something like this perhaps? The shape of the United Kingdom and Ireland is vaguely right, though Cornwall and all of the Scottish islands bar the Shetlands seem to be lacking. Then again, the Isle Of Wight is on holiday off the North Coast of Wales. The Channel Islands have evicted the Isle Of Man, which is off sulking in the North Sea, probably annoying cross Channel ferries into the bargain. Also "Woo! Geography".

In his book A Zebra Is The Piano Of The Animal Kingdom, Jarod Kintz wrote "when you're a cartographer, having to make maps sort of comes with the territory". He's right. When your business is making maps you should be able to do just that. But what if you're not a cartographer? What if you had to draw a map of the country you live in? From memory? What would that map look like?

Maybe something like this perhaps? The shape of the United Kingdom and Ireland is vaguely right, though Cornwall and all of the Scottish islands bar the Shetlands seem to be lacking. Then again, the Isle Of Wight is on holiday off the North Coast of Wales. The Channel Islands have evicted the Isle Of Man, which is off sulking in the North Sea, probably annoying cross Channel ferries into the bargain. Also "Woo! Geography".

hand-drawn-britain-1

Or maybe your lovingly hand drawn map would look like this one, which is my personal favourite for no other reason than the helpful arrow in the North East corner pointing to Iceland (Not The Shop). Readers of this blog who don't live in the UK should know that in addition to being a Nordic island country that straddles the boundary between the North Atlantic and Artic Oceans, Iceland is also a chain of British stores that specialise in frozen food.

hand-drawn-britain-2

I'd like to think that I'd be able to do better than this final example from someone who has applied a significant amount of cartographical license and really, really needs someone to buy them an atlas. I'd like to think that. I might even try to do this myself, but in the interests of preserving what little reputation I have, I'd only post my attempt if it was any good.

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Maps courtesy of BuzzFeed.

King George III Was A Fellow Map Addict

George William Frederick of Hanover, better known as King George III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, is full of details but misses out one key aspect of his life. In addition to concurrently being King, Duke and prince-elect of Brunswick-Lüneburg he was also a map addict and avid map collector.

During the course of his reign between 1760 and 1801, George amassed a collection of around 60,000 maps and views, all of which were housed in a room in Buckingham House (which eventually became Buckingham Palace in 1837) which was right next to his bedroom.

Upon his death, the map collection was bequeathed to the nation and now resides in the British Library and last night a lucky group of people, Alison and myself included, were given a rare chance to get to grips with some of the collection that focused on London. I use the phrase get to grips in the most literal sense. This was no viewing of maps in frames or behind glass. The maps were spread over the table of the library's boardroom and we were encouraged to get really close and do what we so often want to do with an old map but aren't usually allowed to. We got to touch them. We were even allowed to take photos too.

The Wikipedia entry for George William Frederick of Hanover, better known as King George III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, is full of details but misses out one key aspect of his life. In addition to concurrently being King, Duke and prince-elect of Brunswick-Lüneburg he was also a map addict and avid map collector.

During the course of his reign between 1760 and 1801, George amassed a collection of around 60,000 maps and views, all of which were housed in a room in Buckingham House (which eventually became Buckingham Palace in 1837) which was right next to his bedroom.

Upon his death, the map collection was bequeathed to the nation and now resides in the British Library and last night a lucky group of people, Alison and myself included, were given a rare chance to get to grips with some of the collection that focused on London. I use the phrase get to grips in the most literal sense. This was no viewing of maps in frames or behind glass. The maps were spread over the table of the library's boardroom and we were encouraged to get really close and do what we so often want to do with an old map but aren't usually allowed to. We got to touch them. We were even allowed to take photos too.

Created with Nokia Smart Cam

But how did George manage to amass such a prolific collection in 40 odd years? The collection started as the everyday working map library of previous British monarchs, dating back to 1660 and including maps from the times of Charles II, James II and Anne. With this smaller collection as a starting point, George continued his childhood fascination with maps and grew the collection by almost any means possible. When you're a King almost anything and any means are possible.

Some maps were formally commissioned by George, or were presented to him as gifts as a sort of cartographic backhander. Some came into the collection during times of war or conflict, particularly some of the military maps in the collection. Some were stolen outright from foreign sources, whilst some came from much closer to home, from his own subjects.

Created with Nokia Smart Cam

There are stories that George would make random and unannounced visits to people who just so happened to have fine maps on their walls. If George expressed a liking for a map, this was supposed to be a signal that the map's owner, might, just possibly, want to consider giving the map to the King, as a gift you understand. Most people who were the beneficiaries of one of the King's unannounced visits took the hint and the collection grew steadily. But people also got wise to having their houses gatecrashed by their monarch and learned to keep their good maps hidden away. Just in case the next knock on the door turned out to be the King.

At the British Library, George's map collection is formally known as King George III's Topographical Collection, often shorted to the informal KTop. Of the 60,000 maps in KTop over 1,000 are of London. Work has been started on cataloging and ultimately digitising at high resolution all of the London maps. We will all get to benefit from this as the images will be made available for all to come and see on the British Library's website. This is no trivial endeavour. To catalogue and digitise just the 1,000 London maps in the collection will cost £100,000, of which £10,000 is hoped to be raised through public donations. Yet this is just the start. The final goal is to do the same with the remaining 59,000 maps in the collection.

Gary's UK Lumia 820_20131120_008

But until then, the collection remains safely stored somewhere in the depths of the library's buildings on London's Euston Road. I count myself very very lucky indeed to not only have seen some of the KTop with my own eyes but to have been able to reach out and touch a part of cartographic history.

Push Pins, Dots, Customisation, Brands And Services; The Three Waves Of Making Digital Maps

Maptember banner; OpenStreetMap's State Of The Map, the AGI's GeoCommunity and FOSS4G. But there was another event in 2013 that was map related and that was the 50th. anniversary of the British Cartographic Society's Cartographic Journal.

First published in 1964 and edited under the watchful eye of fellow map geek and cartography nerd Ken Field, the Cartographic Journal has been around for longer than I have. Just. This is something that makes me feel slightly less old than I usually do. In February of this year, Ken got in touch with me and asked me if I'd be willing to contribute an article to the 50th anniversary edition of the journal by writing something that attempts to answer the question what does cartography mean to you? Naturally I had to think long and hard about this and after some 30 seconds emailed Ken back saying I'd be privileged and delighted to. So I started writing. As is so often the way, what finally transpired and was published in May, bore little resemblance to my initial thoughts, but thanks to a permissive licensing approach on the part of the publishers, I'm able to reproduce the article below.

The year 2013 has been a great year for maps and a greater year for maps in the United Kingdom, culminating in events that huddled together under the Maptember banner; OpenStreetMap's State Of The Map, the AGI's GeoCommunity and FOSS4G. But there was another event in 2013 that was map related and that was the 50th. anniversary of the British Cartographic Society's Cartographic Journal.

First published in 1964 and edited under the watchful eye of fellow map geek and cartography nerd Ken Field, the Cartographic Journal has been around for longer than I have. Just. This is something that makes me feel slightly less old than I usually do. In February of this year, Ken got in touch with me and asked me if I'd be willing to contribute an article to the 50th anniversary edition of the journal by writing something that attempts to answer the question what does cartography mean to you? Naturally I had to think long and hard about this and after some 30 seconds emailed Ken back saying I'd be privileged and delighted to. So I started writing. As is so often the way, what finally transpired and was published in May, bore little resemblance to my initial thoughts, but thanks to a permissive licensing approach on the part of the publishers, I'm able to reproduce the article below.

CAJ_cover

Introduction

This is not the article that I set out to write. The working title for that article was going to be something along the lines of cartography is subjective; my favourite map probably isn't your favourite map. But every blog post, article or conference talk I write has to start somewhere and armed with this working title I set about trying to find my favourite map.

I was spoilt for choice as I had a vast array of sources to choose from. On Flickr there's the photostream of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library with over 3,000 maps to choose from. Also on Flickr are all the maps I've come across and and have favourited. Then there are my tagged social bookmarks on Delicious plus a plethora of mapping and cartography related articles that sit within my browser's bookmarks. That's a lot of maps and that's not even counting those that are offline in my reasonably large collection of map books.

Figure 1

I soon found out that reviewing all of these maps was by no means as simple a task as I'd first thought. I'd expected a favourite to leap out of the browser's window or book's page at me. Maps were certainly getting my attention but for the wrong reasons. I was able to discount maps I didn't like or maps I was ambivalent about, but even getting the beginnings of a short list of favourites was proving a thankless task. There were just too many good maps. Time was passing and I wasn't anywhere near finding a favourite map, let alone writing an article about it.

But as I continued browsing maps I noticed there was something else on my laptop's screen that was vying for my attention. Actually there were two other things. One was a terminal window that was open and logged into a remote server somewhere on the Internet where I keep a large stash of geographic and mapping data. The other was the icon for the TextMate text editor, sitting in the dock of my MacBook Pro, which I use for coding things, usually maps related code. Realisation slowly dawned on me that my favourite map was yet to come into being; it was the next one that I would make, and the one after that and so on. What I would use to make my next map is what this article should be about.

Despite working with geographical data for almost 30 years, it was not until 2007 that I made the first map for myself. Now I'm not a cartographer or a professional map-maker; if I had to describe myself as anything I'd term myself as a hybrid of a geotechnologist, in the literal sense of someone who works with geography and technology, and a neogeographer.

The combination of geotechnology, of neogeography and more traditional cartographical disciplines has given us repeated phases of acceleration and disruption. In my opinion the uses of digital maps are in the tail end of the second wave of innovation and we're starting to see the beginnings of a third wave. Each wave overlaps, there’s no clear border or delineation between them, but each wave has distinct characteristics.

When talking about making and using digital maps, the focus is on the way in which consumers, developers and the web use resources to create map based experiences, rather than the process of gathering the spatial data that underpins a digital map.

The first wave of digital maps was the combination of a various factors slowly coming together. Critical Mass; The First Wave Precursor

If you look back to before 2005, digital maps were complex and costly to produce. If you worked in this field, you probably had specialist knowledge on how to manipulate geographic and spatial data sets. Part of the cost of early digital maps was the length of time it took to produce them. Large amounts of CPU cycles were needed to convert the map data vectors into the raster images to the Web needed. Another limiting factor was the cost of the disk storage that mapping data sets demanded. In 2000 a Gigabyte of disk space would cost you around $15, compared to the $9000 10 years earlier, but the days of cheap and affordable storage in multiples of Terabytes hadn't yet arrived.

It was as difficult to use early digital maps, as it was to produce them. Availability and adoption of always-on broadband, was yet to arrive. The dominant form of Internet and web access was via dial-up modems, which were pitifully slow by today's standards. The early digital map services were characterised by small maps to save on download times. These services were also functional maps with an emphasis on making conventional paper maps available online. There was little time or motivation in making interesting maps that were easy to use. The First Wave; Mash Ups, Push Pins and Brands

The combination of fast CPUs, more bandwidth and cheaper larger storage came together in 2005 and the first wave of making digital maps started. It was in 2005 that Google launched their Maps API, followed in quick succession by similar offerings from Yahoo and from Microsoft. This was the wave of the web map mashup and it then that I made my first map. It was nothing special and nothing now remains of it, not even a screen shot. It was made using the Yahoo! Maps API and put push pins onto the Yahoo! Maps canvas. But it was the first map I made and I was proud of it at the time.

The first wave was also a branding wave. Whenever you made a web mashup you weren't only creating a map customisation that worked with your data and for your intent. You were also helping the companies that produced web map APIs by giving them free advertising on your web site with their brand. The old adage about no such thing as a free lunch was very much in evidence and looking at the maps you find on today's web, it's still the case. With a few exceptions, a large web mapping corporate organisation powers almost every store finder or local product or service finder and their brand sits, sometimes uneasily, with the brand behind the web site.

This trade off between ease of use and availability of web maps and their branding and styling of was the stimulus behind the second wave of digital maps. The Second Wave; Customisation And The Absence Of Brand

The second wave was the wave of customisable maps as well as of 'open' maps. The growth of the crowd sourced OpenStreetMap and the relatively open availability of being able to do interesting things with this data started to produce maps in all shapes, forms and most importantly, styles. OpenStreetMap itself was responsible for some of these styles, but companies such as CloudMade, founded in 2008 and San Francisco's Stamen Design, founded in 2001, started to make digital map tiles that were not only wildly different to the stock corporate theme of the original set of mapping APIs but in some cases were works of art in their own right as well as being maps.

Figure 2

Hand in hand with the proliferation of map styles came mapping APIs which were in marked contrast to the APIs of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! The functionality available through all of the mapping APIs were roughly on a par. You created a basic HTML document and pointed an API at an element of that document which the API filled with a map on your behalf. The map is what we now term a slippy map; one that you can drag, pan and zoom around with a mouse or your finger. The map appears to slip around on the screen and is a viewport onto the larger one that appears to be hidden behind your web page. You can add controls to the map, you can add custom overlays onto it and in most cases you can even add other map tiles from a different source. But the starting point is always the originating company's branded map and even if you can change the tile source to customise the map, not that many people will choose to do so. This is in much the same way as the web browser that comes preinstalled onto your computer is the one that most people tend to use. Even if you provide a way to customise something, only a small percentage of people will generally take advantage of that facility.

The second wave has also been a wave of opposites; of the brand-less map and of the return of the vector map.

With open sourced APIs such as OpenLayers and more recently the Cloudmade originated Leaflet, there was no branded map to start with. You had to make a choice and select a digital map tile provider in order to make your map. In contrast to the brand-less maps APIs, toolkits such as Mapstraction allowed you to abstract away the specifics of an individual mapping API. With this approach you can preserve your investment by using a single API. You can also move to another provider by changing as little as a single line of JavaScript code.

Digital maps have almost always been vector maps at heart, but this has historically been a back end function in the map-making process. Rendering vectors in a browser or mobile app took processing power that just wasn’t available to the early digital maps, even if vector data is traditionally smaller and more compact than the bitmap images which power the traditional slippy map. But hand in hand with the use of vectors in mobile clients such as Google’s Maps app and Nokia’s HERE Maps app there’s also been a resurgence of the use of vectors in the browser.

Most of today’s modern browsers support both of the two competing implementations for vector graphics; the World Wide Web Consortium’s SVG and most recently, HTML5’s Canvas. As JavaScript APIs and toolkits spring up to take advantage of vector graphics, vector maps have started to appear. The New York Time’s Mike Bostock maintains D3.js and Adobe’s Dmitry Baranovskiy maintains Raphaël. Both of these are JavaScript libraries which allow you to visualise vector data and both of which support some form of maps.

Figure 3

Of course, in order to visualise vector data, you need vector data to work with in the first place and free and open sources of this are increasing rapidly from 2005’s GeoCommons (now owned by ESRI) to 2009’s Natural Earth in addition to proprietary vector data from the mapping corporates. The Third Wave; Maps As A Service

We're now at the tail end of the second wave and beginning to see the emergence of a third wave. This is the wave of maps as a service or MAAS, a specialisation of software as a service, commonly known by its SAAS acronym.

Maps as a service takes away the bother of having to write JavaScript code to exercise a mapping API and instead allows you to simply upload your raw data and the MAAS of your choice will do the heavy lifting for you. An early exemplar of MAAS was Stamen's Dotspotting, which whilst a simplistic 'dots on maps' implementation, allows a relatively sophisticated map visualisation to be produced with virtually no prior experience of working with geographical data sets or with maps. More recently CartoDB has taken the Dotspotting approach several steps further allowing extremely sophisticated mapping visualisations to be created, enabling these maps to be embedded in other web site and allowing access via an API. The latest entrant to making visualisation more accessible is Google Map Engine Lite, which builds on the heritage of Dotspotting and CartoDB.

Figure 4

Maps as a service means more than just simply making the process of creating digital maps easier and more accessible. It also incorporates the process of creating map tiles and vectors and making them accessible to everyone. From open source projects such as TileDrawer to the growth and success of MapBox, you can now control and manage the entire production of a digital map, from raw data, through mapping API to final user experience.

The digital maps waves commenced with an initial critical mass. Fast broadband Internet pipes offer ever-increasing bandwidth. The processing speed of CPUs continues to prove Moore’s Law. The ever-decreasing price of mass storage is now levels that were almost unthinkable a decade ago. Digital maps have proliferated across our desktop and laptop computers, our mobile phones and tablets, across almost anything that is connected to the Internet.

Despite industry commentators predicting the death of the map, the digital map still remains one of the best ways of visualising geographic, spatial and local information. Even if you were never taught to read a map, a map is inherently comforting and familiar and we automatically orientate ourselves to one. Looking Forwards; Repetition And The Unexpected

We’re now in the early stages of the third wave of making and sharing digital maps, be they bitmap based slippy maps, vector maps or 3D maps. Each wave has built on the success of the previous, usually accompanied by challenging the existing status quo. There is much irony here, when one considers that the origin of a wave is often said to be a disturbance in the surrounding medium.

Wherever the third wave takes the map and in whatever shape or form the inevitable fourth wave takes is unclear but the continuing development and innovation around the map is one of the key things that keeps making maps so compelling and such an interesting space to work in. As the return to vector maps shows, the waves of digital maps are a unique intersection between revisiting and learning from past technologies and innovation and disruption. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw slightly history repeats itself and the unexpected always happens. This article originally appeared in Volume 50 of the Cartographic Journal in May 2013.

Introducing The Next Generation Of Portable Navigation Systems

Today's digital maps, both on the web, on our mobile phones and in our cars are almost ubiquitous. But they're not without their problems. They need recharging, updating and most need some form of network connectivity and that's even before you look at the potential privacy aspects of who's watching your position. But now there's the next generation of portable navigation system.

This unprecedented technological revolution works without cables, without electronics, without a network connection and is both compact and portable. Integrated into a flexible cellulose based pad, it expands from the size of your pocket to as much as 48" via the patented FUF technology (folding and unfolding).

Panning, zooming and rotation can be performed without image degradation; it's fast, working smoothly within picoseconds. It also respects a user's privacy, it's impossible to hack and there's no need for any antivirus or firewall.

It's unbreakable, private and portable and goes by the name of MAP. Trust me, you'll all be using one sooner or later.

The Curious Cartographical Case Of The Island Of California

I want it now, dammit". Nowhere is this more evident than in maps. If something is wrong on a map, we expect it to be fixed. Now. Ten or so years ago, it would be common to wait somewhere between 12 and 18 months for a map's updates to be collected, validated and published. These days, thanks to our modern digital maps, we get our updates in more or less Internet Time and that means fast. It hasn't always been that way.

Although waiting over a year for a map update seems almost unthinkable now, consider for a moment having to wait almost half a century for a map to be updated. Yet this is what happened in the curious cartographical case of the Island of California.

I should state up front that I've been to California, quite a few times. The weather is fine (apart from San Francisco's fog), it's home to the technical hub of Silicon Valley and the local food and wine are rather good. It is most definitely not an island and what's more, there's a distinct lack of tribes of beautiful Amazonian warriors wielding gold tools and weaponry. Yet in 1510, Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo published a novel entitled Las Sergas de Esplandián, or The Adventures Of Esplandián, which mentions the Island of California, populated by the aforementioned female warriors. The name and concept of an island stuck and early Spanish explorers of what we now call Baja California were convinced the new territory they had found was part of the Island of California.

In retrospect, early maps of the New World actually got the geography of California right. Both Mercator, he of web map projection controversy, in 1538 and Ortelius, in 1570, made maps that correctly showed California as a peninsula.

We've become firmly accustomed to the instant gratification of Internet Time, which can be roughly summarised as "I want it now, dammit". Nowhere is this more evident than in maps. If something is wrong on a map, we expect it to be fixed. Now. Ten or so years ago, it would be common to wait somewhere between 12 and 18 months for a map's updates to be collected, validated and published. These days, thanks to our modern digital maps, we get our updates in more or less Internet Time and that means fast. It hasn't always been that way.

Although waiting over a year for a map update seems almost unthinkable now, consider for a moment having to wait almost half a century for a map to be updated. Yet this is what happened in the curious cartographical case of the Island of California.

I should state up front that I've been to California, quite a few times. The weather is fine (apart from San Francisco's fog), it's home to the technical hub of Silicon Valley and the local food and wine are rather good. It is most definitely not an island and what's more, there's a distinct lack of tribes of beautiful Amazonian warriors wielding gold tools and weaponry. Yet in 1510, Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo published a novel entitled Las Sergas de Esplandián, or The Adventures Of Esplandián, which mentions the Island of California, populated by the aforementioned female warriors. The name and concept of an island stuck and early Spanish explorers of what we now call Baja California were convinced the new territory they had found was part of the Island of California.

In retrospect, early maps of the New World actually got the geography of California right. Both Mercator, he of web map projection controversy, in 1538 and Ortelius, in 1570, made maps that correctly showed California as a peninsula.

americae-sive-novi-orbis-nova-descriptio

But that all changed in 1602.

A merchant, Sebastián Vizcaíno, was appointed by the Viceroy of New Spain to examine the coastal regions and make new maps. On board one of Vizcaíno's expeditions was one Antonia de la Ascensión who wrote ...

that the whole Kingdom of California discovered on this voyage, is the largest island known…and that it is separated from the provinces of New Mexico by the Mediterranean Sea of California.

This geographic blunder was further reinforced by Antonia Vázquez de Espinosa, who wrote in 1615 that ...

California is an island, and not continental, as it is represented on the maps made by the cosmographers.

The notion of California as an island was thus firmly cemented in the minds of the day's cartographers, featuring in the first general atlas of the world that was published in England between 1626 and 1627. Even European cartographers finally gave up in their portrayal of California as a peninsula and by 1650 all maps of note showed the Island.

sy409bk9698_05_0001_medium

And so it remained until 1705 when a Jesuit missionary, Father Eusebio Kino, made a report of his journeys, with an accompanying map, that showed that California really was attached to the rest of the North American continent. Even then, it took until 1746 when another Jesuit, Fernando Consag, tried and failed to sail around the non-existant island, to put an end to the Island of California.

Despite this, it took a further 50 or so years before maps showed California as we now know it to be, part of North America and not, as de Montalvo wrote, being close to the Asian mainland and also "very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise".

vj377yr4487_05_0001_medium

Next time you get annoyed and frustrated by a modern map not being entirely up to date, you can rest assured that it'll probably take a month or two at the most to be updated and not a half century. In the meantime, the Island of California remains an enduring oddity in the history books of exploration and cartography and one which is showcased on Stanford University's web site as part of the Glen McLaughlin collection.

Image credits: Stanford University Library and the Glen McLaughlin Collection

The Tube Map To End All Tube Maps That's Made Of Tube Maps

London Underground network, people just won't stop creating variants of the map. I may have written about these once, twice, three or even more times. But now, there's a reworking of the Tube map to possibly end all Tube maps reworks.

At first sight, surely it's yet another Tube map rework? Quirky and amusing line names in the right colours? Check. Station names that aren't the current station names? Check. Faithfully reproducing the line layout? Check.

But then you dig deeper and discover that this isn't just another Tube map rework, it's a Tube map of Tube map reworks. Each station is assigned one of the other Tube map reworks that today's Interwebs seem to be full of. Each line tries to categorise the Tube map reworks into some, albeit subjective, categorisation.

Despite Transport for London owning the copyright (and enforcing it) on Harry Beck's iconic map of the London Underground network, people just won't stop creating variants of the map. I may have written about these once, twice, three or even more times. But now, there's a reworking of the Tube map to possibly end all Tube maps reworks.

At first sight, surely it's yet another Tube map rework? Quirky and amusing line names in the right colours? Check. Station names that aren't the current station names? Check. Faithfully reproducing the line layout? Check.

But then you dig deeper and discover that this isn't just another Tube map rework, it's a Tube map of Tube map reworks. Each station is assigned one of the other Tube map reworks that today's Interwebs seem to be full of. Each line tries to categorise the Tube map reworks into some, albeit subjective, categorisation.

tube-map-pastiche

Thus Maxwell Robert's curvy Tube map rework sits on a station in Edgware's place called Curvy and on a line called Reworked, while the early pre-Beck era map sits where Ealing Broadway should be and at the interchange of the Metaphor and Official lines.

tube-map-pastiche-detail

This is verging dangerously close to genius in my book and Esri's Ken Field deserves some form of award for taking the time and effort to put this together. My one minor and extremely subjective niggle is that the explanatory text in the sidebar says click the stations to go to further details. My first exploratory foray into this map, clicking on the station names, yielded multiple popup dialog boxes saying No information available. Luckily Barry Rowlingson helpfully pointed out that what I should have been clicking on was the station interchange circles and the little offset lugs from each line and not the name itself.

tube-map-pastiche-twitter

Will this be the last word in Tube map pastiches? Probably not. Does it take a certain sort of mad cartographical endeavour to bring this all together? Probably. Has it wasted far too much of my time digging into the Tube maps I already know and showing me ones I didn't? Maybe. Have I had masses of almost educational fun playing with this map? Absolutely.

From Wasserklo to Grashügel by way of Königskreuz St. Pankraz; The London U-Bahn Map

Yesterday I took the S-Bahn from my local train station in the suburbs of London. At the terminus at Wasserklo I took the Nördlich U-Bahn Linie to Königskreuz St. Pankraz, changing onto the Städtich Linie and finally alighted at Grashügel. No. Wait. That's not right.

What I actually did was take the South West Trains suburban line into London Waterloo, hopped on the Northern Line to King's Cross St. Pancras and then changed onto the Metropolitan Line and got off at Farringdon. What's going on here?

london-u-bahn

This is the London Underground map, but not as we know it. Horst Prillinger has taken all the station names and translated them, sometimes literally, sometimes using the underlying etymology of the name. As Horst says in his accompanying blog post, back in 2004 when this first surfaced ...

The results range from sensibly boring to downright absurd, and the weird thing is that some of the funniest translations are in fact not made up, but the actual etymological meaning of the place name.

Obviously, you need to have a pretty good command of German to find this funny.

I have only a cursory command of the German language but I was still able to find this clever and funny in equal measures.

Mapniture

place on Foursquare. What could you possibly add to your household?

The answer, spotted by Tim Waters, is naturally, map furniture.

map-chair

Where better to sit in comfort with a glass of your favourite tipple and plot your next mapping endeavour?

Naturally, I want one.

You're a fully fledged map geek and cartography nerd. Your house is plastered with maps. You even have your map room as a place on Foursquare. What could you possibly add to your household?

The answer, spotted by Tim Waters, is naturally, map furniture.

map-chair

Where better to sit in comfort with a glass of your favourite tipple and plot your next mapping endeavour?

Naturally, I want one.

I Am Not At State Of The Map 2013 But There Is A Viral Map

Maptember 2013 and that means I should be in Birmingham for the OpenStreetMap State Of The Map conference. But I'm not; I'm still at home in the suburbs of South West London. But I will still be appearing at SOTM. Virtually.

Due to the age old cliche of circumstances beyond my control, I can't be in Birmingham this weekend, despite submitting How To Make A Map Go Viral (In 8 Easy Steps) as a talk for the SOTM conference. But thanks to the wonders of modern digital technology, in other words, a screencast, my talk is still on the conference schedule, even if I'm not.

The talk is an update to one of the same title that I gave at London's GeoMob back in April of this year and was submitted to the SOTM committee with this abstract ...

In February of 2013 I mashed up a geocoded list of global place names and made a map of them using nothing more than Stamen's OSM based Toner tile-set and the Leaflet maps API. I then promptly forgot about it. But Twitter had other ideas and the Vaguely Rude Place Names map went viral resulting in a month's worth of media madness. This is the story of how the map came to be and what happened when traditional media met social media ... on a map. It's also the story of how the combination of rude names, innuendo and maps briefly appealed to people the world over.

When I learned that I wouldn't be able to go to Birmingham, the conference organisers kindly suggested that maybe I might want to pre-record my talk instead. Which is just what I've done. You'll see it embedded below.

Today is the 7th. of Maptember 2013 and that means I should be in Birmingham for the OpenStreetMap State Of The Map conference. But I'm not; I'm still at home in the suburbs of South West London. But I will still be appearing at SOTM. Virtually.

Due to the age old cliche of circumstances beyond my control, I can't be in Birmingham this weekend, despite submitting How To Make A Map Go Viral (In 8 Easy Steps) as a talk for the SOTM conference. But thanks to the wonders of modern digital technology, in other words, a screencast, my talk is still on the conference schedule, even if I'm not.

The talk is an update to one of the same title that I gave at London's GeoMob back in April of this year and was submitted to the SOTM committee with this abstract ...

In February of 2013 I mashed up a geocoded list of global place names and made a map of them using nothing more than Stamen's OSM based Toner tile-set and the Leaflet maps API. I then promptly forgot about it. But Twitter had other ideas and the Vaguely Rude Place Names map went viral resulting in a month's worth of media madness. This is the story of how the map came to be and what happened when traditional media met social media ... on a map. It's also the story of how the combination of rude names, innuendo and maps briefly appealed to people the world over.

When I learned that I wouldn't be able to go to Birmingham, the conference organisers kindly suggested that maybe I might want to pre-record my talk instead. Which is just what I've done. You'll see it embedded below.

State Of The Map 2013 - How A Map Can Go Viral (In 8 Simple Steps) from Gary Gale on Vimeo.

Apart from a few cosmetic changes and updates, it's the same talk as I gave in April and if you're interested in my notes and slides, you'll find them in my write up from April.

If you were lucky enough to have been at SOTM this year, I hope you enjoyed the conference and I hope you enjoyed my talk and that my disembodied voice wasn't too off putting. This is the first screencast I've put together, so be gentle. See you all at SOTM next year. Hopefully.

Bad Cartography - Stansted, Essex (Airport) vs. Stansted, Kent (Not An Airport)

It has to be said, short haul European flights are a bit on the boring side. Once you've read the day's newspaper, had a drink and a snack and read a few chapters of a book there's not much else to do. Most airlines that hop between European destinations don't have inflight wifi yet and there's no inflight entertainment to be had, except to watch your progress towards your destination on the map that appears on the screen over your head.

So it was with this map, which was snapped on a flight a few days ago from Rome's Fiumicino airport to London's Heathrow was coming to a close. But there's something wrong with this map.

If there's one thing that stands out more than a map that says "you are here", it's a map that says "you are here" and seems to get the map wrong.

It has to be said, short haul European flights are a bit on the boring side. Once you've read the day's newspaper, had a drink and a snack and read a few chapters of a book there's not much else to do. Most airlines that hop between European destinations don't have inflight wifi yet and there's no inflight entertainment to be had, except to watch your progress towards your destination on the map that appears on the screen over your head.

So it was with this map, which was snapped on a flight a few days ago from Rome's Fiumicino airport to London's Heathrow was coming to a close. But there's something wrong with this map.

stansted

London has three major airports, of which Heathrow is the only one that's anywhere near Central London. The other two, Gatwick and Stansted, are out in the so called Home Counties, in Sussex and in Essex respectively. But that's not what the inflight map seems to show. Or does it? The map seems to show that we were flying directly over Stansted but that somehow London's third airport had mysteriously been moved from the north east of London to south of the River Thames, somewhere south of Gravesend.

My gut reaction was that the inflight map was just wrong. But the clue to this in all in the name Stansted (and not Stanstead as it's commonly misspelt). There is indeed a Stansted (a small village notable for a lack of airport) in Kent as well as a Stansted (and an airport) in Essex.

All of which makes me wonder just what the map's cartographers were thinking when they thought to put the village of Stansted, with a population of around 200, on an inflight map and with seemingly equal billing with some of the UK's major cities and manage to confuse it with a major UK airport. This isn't a recent map slip up either, as Wikipedia reports that this has been in place since 2007.

In early 2007, British Airways mistakenly used inflight 'skymaps' that relocated Stanstead Airport, Essex to Stansted in Kent. Skymaps show passengers their location, but the mistake was luckily not replicated on the pilots' navigation system. BA blamed outside contractors hired to make the map. "It was the mistake of the independent company that produced the software," said a spokeswoman. "The cartographer appears to have confused the vast Essex airport, which handles 25 million passengers a year, with this tiny Kent village, also called Stansted, which has a population of around 200".

Time for a refresh of British Airway's inflight maps I think.

The Rise And Fall Of Empires. On A Map Of Course

One of the things we loose in today's up to date maps on the web and on our mobiles is how things used to be; the temporal problem of digital maps for want of a better phrase. It's not that there's no data on the past, it just doesn't surface very often.

But sometimes the data does surface and then people make maps of what used to be. Take the British Empire for example. When I went to school in the early 1970's there were maps of the world in almost every class room and they were old maps. Whether down to a lack of funding or as a reminder of what Britain used to be, these maps still showed the extent of the empire, in a pale shade of reddish-pink.

british-empire

Or there's the growing and then shrinking extent of the Roman Empire, spanning 27 BC through to 1453 AD.

roman-empire

There's a whole load more Empire maps over at io9.com. However nice it is to see maps of the past, I have the same problems with these maps as I did of the maps of the changing boundaries of Europe. A static map or an animated GIF cry out for the modern interactivity of a web map. Looking at the maps above I just want to pan and zoom them and run the timeline forwards and backwards. But finding the geospatial data to do this is no easy thing.

But as a comment on my post on the maps of Europe pointed out, there is some data out there. Maybe when I get back from my summer vacation I'll make the empire maps that I want to see.

Photo Credits: Roman Empire map and British Empire map on Wikimedia.

Your Coffee And You

And now for something completely different; a post which has only the most tenuous of a link to maps. Instead and because it's Friday, this post concentrates on my second favourite obsession after maps. That can only be the dark brown, almost black, water of life we know as coffee.

As a direct follow on from Thierry Gregorius' helpful guide to work out what the tools you use to make maps say about you, I offer up, courtesy of the Doghouse Diaries, another helpful guide. This time it's what your coffee says about you.

doghouse-coffee

Personally, I think there's another personality type that's missing from this valuable piece of sociological insight. The explanation goes You love maps as much as you love coffee. You're searching for the perfect espresso to complement the production of your next map masterpiece. But I'm still unsure whether it needs to be filed under Long Black or Quadruple Espresso.

And if that's not enough, from the wonderful Pleated Jeans, comes a breakdown of all of the type of coffee that are around, as well as a few that are not.

types-of-coffee-1 types-of-coffee2 types-of-coffee3 types-of-coffee4

The normal, mostly map related stuff will be resumed in my next post, until then have a great weekend.

A virtual double espresso is due to Mark Evans, he of GeoLoco fame, for bringing this coffee madness and wonderment to my attention.

Image credits: Doghouse Diaries and Pleated Jeans.

Just Because You Can Put Things On A Map Doesn't Always Mean You Should Allow Anyone To Put Things On A Map

Crowd sourcing data is a laudable approach. Crowd sourcing data and putting it one a map seems like a good idea. Crowd sourcing data and putting it on a map without any verification or checks? You might not end up with what you originally intended.

This is a lesson that Benadryl, the hay fever medication, has sadly learned the hard way. At first sight it seems innocuous enough; a hay fever relief brand teams up with the UK's Met Office to crowd source areas where there's a high pollen count.

social-pollen-count

You take that crowd sourced information and put it on a map so fellow hay fever sufferers know what to expect in their neighbourhood and with the presumed side effect that if you are a hay fever sufferer then maybe you might want to pop out and buy some Benadryl to help cope with the symptoms.

But people are ... creative and whilst you might get an accurate map of high pollen count areas you might also find that people want to be ... well let's just call it artistic.

First of all a series of map markers across Westminster, on the bank of London's River Thames seemed to spell out a word that rhymes with duck. Note that for those of you with a sensitive disposition or who are reading this at work, the screen shots below have been pixellated out for your comfort and convenience; you can click through for the NSFW versions if you so choose.

social-pollen-count-1

This was followed in quick succession by another word, this time rhyming with bit, appearing across London's Docklands area.

social-pollen-count-2

Who knows how far the creative hay fever sufferers of the United Kingdom would have taken this but it wasn't to last. Benadryl noticed this new form of map art and quickly took the social pollen count site down and it has since reappeared, though this time there seems to be some checks in place so that users can report high pollen count areas and only high pollen count areas. But whilst their developers were frantically trying to put some safeguards in place, it has to be said that Benadryl put up a temporary replacement that shows a certain sense of style and a whole lot of class.

social-pollen-count-thanks

Screen shot credits: Us vs. Them.

Mapping Posh London vs. Hipster London

posh. It looks pretty much as I'd imagine.

If you live in a city for any period of time, you form a mental image of what quantifies certain areas or neighbourhoods. If someone mentions, say, posh London, I instantly think of the area around Mayfair and Knightsbridge. But you could put this personal and biased view on a map?

It turns out Yelp has done just that, producing a heat map of my home city of all the reviews that mention posh. It looks pretty much as I'd imagine.

london-yelp-map-posh

The same applies for the term hipster. I'd immediately associate the area around Hoxton and Old Street (AKA Silicon Roundabout) with all things hipsterish. As it turns out, so do Yelp's reviewers.

london-yelp-map-hipster

All of which is oddly comforting. Maybe my mental map of a city isn't so personal and subjective after all.

A tip of the hat is due to Chris Osborne for pointing out these mapping gems.

Customising WordPress Without Modifying Core, Theme Or Plugin Files

WP Customizer and that's what this plugin is for. When WordPress does support such a way, this plugin will thankfully be obsolete.

A standard WordPress install is incredibly powerful and flexible. For a lot of people, WordPress out of the box plus one of the stock WordPress themes is enough. But the possibilities for customization are endless; you can add plugins and other themes. Sometimes these do just what you want. Sometimes you need to ... tweak WordPress.

A very high proportion of the customization advice you'll find on the web starts with these lines ... add the following to the end of your theme's functions.php or even worse, advises that you modify the source code of your theme or your plugins. This is bad for many reasons:

WordPress doesn't yet support a way for site specific customizations to be made and loaded without touching theme, plugin or core files; that's why I wrote WP Customizer and that's what this plugin is for. When WordPress does support such a way, this plugin will thankfully be obsolete.

screenshot-1 There's another, not entirely altruistic, reason behind this plugin. One of the most common support requests I get for WP Biographia is to help with clashes between someone's theme's CSS and the plugin's CSS. Once that's been resolved, the next question is almost always how do I load this custom CSS? The answer is now straightforward. Put your CSS file in a directory in the root of your WordPress installation, install WP Customizer, tell it to load custom CSS files and where to find them and you're done. No editing of functions.php. No learning now to hook into the wp_enqueue_scripts action, no learning how to call wp_register_style and wp_enqueue_style. It should all just work.

But WP Customizer works with more than just custom CSS files. You can also load custom PHP functions and custom Javascript and jQuery files as well. What's more, you can configure these to load just for your site's publicly visible front end, just for your site's admin pages or even both.

WP Customizer uses the file system as a data-store metaphor and allows you to main a library of common customisations that are independent of the theme and plugins you're currently using. Out of the box, the plugin looks for custom files to load in the root of your WordPress installation in a set of named directories which should be relatively self explanatory, functions, admin_functions, common_functions and so on for CSS and for scripts.

But you can just as easily create your own directory structure, put together in a way that makes sense to you, perhaps something along the lines of ... site/front-end/css, site/front-end/functions, site/admin/scripts and so on

... you're limited only by the limitations of your file system and the way of organising things that make sense to you.

screenshot-5 One final word of caution though. In order to use this plugin, you have to know how to write the code that lives in the customisation files themselves. That means knowing how to write PHP functions to exercise the WordPress API. How to write JavaScript and jQuery that works with WordPress. How to write CSS. This plugin can't help you with that. But there's ample tutorials and information out there on the interwebs to help you.

Just remember, when you read something that says just add the following code to your theme's functions.php, ignore this little piece of advice and add it a local customisation file and load that through WP Customizer instead. Your WordPress site will thank you for it someday.

To download or install WP Customizer, either search for WP Customizer from the WordPress Dashboard or go to plugin’s page on the official WordPress plugin repository. If you want to fork the source code of the plugin, you can find it on the plugin’s GitHub page at https://github.com/vicchi/wp-customizer.

Less A Map Of Vinland, More A Map Of Fakeland

Which makes maps that prove that someone really did get there first extremely coveted and extremely valuable in about equal measures. The combination of value, national pride and good old human greed also makes early maps a fertile breeding ground for trickery and fakery.

The discovery of the fourth continent, after Europe, Asia and Africa, seems to have had more than its fair share of controversy.

Popular opinion holds that Cristoforo Columbo, better known as the anglicised Christopher Columbus, got to America first in 1492. Of course first is a loaded term; Columbus may have been the first European to set foot in the Americas but he certainly wasn't the first human on the continent. But did Columbus get there first?

Probably not; there's now growing evidence that a Norse expedition, led by Leif Ericson, landed on what is now Newfoundland in the 11th Century after being blown off course by a storm when travelling from Norway to Greenland. According to the Book of Icelanders, compiled around 1122 by Ari The Wise, Ericson first landed on a rocky and desolute place he named Helluland or Flat Rock Land, which may have been Baffin Island and then sailed for a further two days before landing again in a place he named Vinland, often mistranslated literally as Wineland but more likely to mean Land with Great Grass Fields.

Of course it would help if there was a map of Vinland, to underscore the I got there first point.

Some uses of maps have remained relatively unchanged through the ages. We still use them to find out where we are and how to get somewhere else. Governments still use them to say "this is mine, that is yours". But as our planet has now been pretty comprehensively mapped, we don't use them to say "I got here first" that much anymore.

Which makes maps that prove that someone really did get there first extremely coveted and extremely valuable in about equal measures. The combination of value, national pride and good old human greed also makes early maps a fertile breeding ground for trickery and fakery.

The discovery of the fourth continent, after Europe, Asia and Africa, seems to have had more than its fair share of controversy.

Popular opinion holds that Cristoforo Columbo, better known as the anglicised Christopher Columbus, got to America first in 1492. Of course first is a loaded term; Columbus may have been the first European to set foot in the Americas but he certainly wasn't the first human on the continent. But did Columbus get there first?

Probably not; there's now growing evidence that a Norse expedition, led by Leif Ericson, landed on what is now Newfoundland in the 11th Century after being blown off course by a storm when travelling from Norway to Greenland. According to the Book of Icelanders, compiled around 1122 by Ari The Wise, Ericson first landed on a rocky and desolute place he named Helluland or Flat Rock Land, which may have been Baffin Island and then sailed for a further two days before landing again in a place he named Vinland, often mistranslated literally as Wineland but more likely to mean Land with Great Grass Fields.

Of course it would help if there was a map of Vinland, to underscore the I got there first point.

vinland

Luckily in 1957 a map of Vinland came to light, as part of short medieval text called the Hystoria Tartaorum (The Tartar Relation). The Vinland map seemed to be dated from the 15th Century and in true mappa mundi tradition showed the world as it was known then, with Africa, Asia, Europe as well as a landmass labelled Vinland to the South West of Greenland. Coincidentally, three years after the Vinland map emerged, an archeological dig uncovered a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Surely this proved the authenticity of the Vinland map?

In the years since, the Vinland map has attracted controversy with as many people believing its authenticity as those who thought it a fake.

Enter John Paul Floyd, a Glaswegian researcher who seems to have proved that the parchment the Vinland map is drawn on is a genuine 15th Century relic. That's the parchment, not the map though. Floyd has discovered that the Hystoria Tartaorum was displayed at an event in 1892 and again in 1926 and on both occasions the document was conspicuously map free. Add to this the fact that the Vinland map uses textual idioms more consistent with the 17th Century than 200 years ealier and that the map includes characteristics found in 18th Century reproductions of a 1463 world map and all the evidence is pointing to the Vinland map being a fake created sometime between the 1920s and the 1950s.

Leif Ericson may have been the first European to visit and colonise the Americas, but there still seems to be no map known that says he did it first.

If you're one of the people who have a Times and Sunday Times paywall account, there's more coverage on the Sunday Times website; for the remaining 99.999% of the population, there's additional coverage over at BoingBoing.

Photo Credits: Wikipedia.

Test Drive The New Google Maps Preview; With A Little Bit Of Cookie Hacking

request an invite and not everyone gets one of those it seems. But if you're impatient or curious and don't mind a tiny amount of technical hackery you can get to test drive the new version without the need to be one of those blessed with a preview invite.

If you go to Google Maps right now, you'll still see the current incarnation of Google's map. This is what the map of my home town looks like. The new preview version is there, you just can't see it.

There's a new version of Google Maps for the web but so far it's not for everyone. You need to request an invite and not everyone gets one of those it seems. But if you're impatient or curious and don't mind a tiny amount of technical hackery you can get to test drive the new version without the need to be one of those blessed with a preview invite.

If you go to Google Maps right now, you'll still see the current incarnation of Google's map. This is what the map of my home town looks like. The new preview version is there, you just can't see it.

Google Maps

The key to unlocking the new preview is held in a cookie called NID. If you change the cookie's value from one impenetrable string of characters to another, equally impenetrable string of characters, the preview will automagically get unlocked. There's several ways to modify a cookie; as I use Chrome on a daily basis I used the Edit This Cookie extension, but there's other ways to do this depending on your browser of choice. Once you've found the NID cookie, change its value to ...

67=MzRdy0T16I7lw9REhtIF5N5lkuoSy1s7cJGFa24wZ6pRK0kRpU9SqiTWy9r_DQ4UxdmHjSeMImvsqgrVUbC0T9FhuESvl__dlkZwRBTxkzxWcdq8vDcpuvnuve6yI78LeqFFK21yc0_6Bp3cHS4Z3a6nwwBQm_fW8DfHF7lv6OrkDosmMa-GaDOLVXR2ewK5-xAk

... and reload the page. Hey presto. Welcome to the new Google Maps.

Google Maps Preview One final word of warning; this is a hack. It's likely to change or go away at any time. If you're a Chrome user, it also seems to wreak havoc with Chrome's omnibox searches as well. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Open Data Yields Tangible Results - And Tangible Maps

2013 would be the year of the tangible map.

This hope was prompted by the maps I saw at one of London's geomob meetups in November of 2012, where I saw and, importantly for a tangible map, touched Anna Butler's London wall map and a prototype of David Overton's SplashMap.

The hopeful prediction was made as a result of literally getting my hands on one of Anna's London maps and it's a treasured possession, though still sadly needing a suitable frame before it can take pride of place on a wall at home.

But what of SplashMaps? In November 2012 the project was on Kickstarter and I was one of the investors in this most tangible of maps. In December 2012 Splashmaps met their funding targets and went into production and today, through the letterbox came my own, tangible, foldable, scrunchable and almost indestructible SplashMap of my local neighbourhood.

In January of this year I made a hopeful prediction that 2013 would be the year of the tangible map.

This hope was prompted by the maps I saw at one of London's geomob meetups in November of 2012, where I saw and, importantly for a tangible map, touched Anna Butler's London wall map and a prototype of David Overton's SplashMap.

The hopeful prediction was made as a result of literally getting my hands on one of Anna's London maps and it's a treasured possession, though still sadly needing a suitable frame before it can take pride of place on a wall at home.

But what of SplashMaps? In November 2012 the project was on Kickstarter and I was one of the investors in this most tangible of maps. In December 2012 Splashmaps met their funding targets and went into production and today, through the letterbox came my own, tangible, foldable, scrunchable and almost indestructible SplashMap of my local neighbourhood.

IMG_1190

Now all if this could be taken to be simply my crowing with delight over maps. But there's a deeper context to all of these tangible maps. Both the London Wall Map and SplashMaps have come about due to one single thing ... open data. The case has often been made, though equally as often misunderstood, that open data is an economic stimulus. As many people ask why should we give something away for free as ask for data to opened up to the public.

IMG_1189

Both of these maps wouldn't have been financially possible without access to open data; the pre-open data era licensing costs and restrictions alone would have put paid to any startup opportunities an aspiring entrepreneur came up with. But in these maps, the proof of what open data can do has become very real, indeed very tangible.

Marvellous Miniature Map

Some maps are works of art; this miniature marvel is no exception. You'd be forgiven for thinking it's deserved of a place hanging on someone's wall, but the truth is that this map is far more likely to end up in a rubbish bin.

That's because this marvellous miniature map lives on the cover of a box of matches and empty boxes of matches have a very short shelf life before they end up in the rubbish. Which is a crying shame as this beautiful map with Mount Fuji in the background, a house and what looks like a tram deserves a kinder fate than that.

japanese-matchbox-label

Photo Credits: Jane McDevitt on Flickr.

How A Map Can Go Viral (In 8 Simple Steps)

Vaguely Rude Places Map, Ed Freyfogle from London's #geomob meetup got in touch and asked me to come and tell the story behind the map. This is that story.

And so last night, in the Chadwick Lecture Theatre in the basement of London's UCL, after listening to some amazing presentations on building a map of mobile cell tower coverage, of building a seismically powered alternative to GPS and a whole host of other great talks, I took my place on the podium and started where any good story needs to start ... at the beginning.

Back in February of this year, at the height of the madness that was the Vaguely Rude Places Map, Ed Freyfogle from London's #geomob meetup got in touch and asked me to come and tell the story behind the map. This is that story.

And so last night, in the Chadwick Lecture Theatre in the basement of London's UCL, after listening to some amazing presentations on building a map of mobile cell tower coverage, of building a seismically powered alternative to GPS and a whole host of other great talks, I took my place on the podium and started where any good story needs to start ... at the beginning.

Slide01

Slide02

So, hello, I’m Gary and I’m from the Internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Global Community Programs for HERE Maps, formerly known as Nokia Location & Commerce. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide03

There’s a lot of URLs in the slides to follow and rather than try to frantically jot them down, this is the only URL you really need to know about. If you go there right now, this link will 404 on you but sometime tomorrow this where my slides and all my talk notes will appear here.

https://vtny.org/mo Slide04

In today’s global market place when you choose a brand name you normally do some research to make sure that the name you choose doesn’t mean something unfortunate in another language. Most brands succeed at this …

Slide05

… some don’t

Slide06

But the names of most of the places in the world came about long before globalisation and the reach of today’s interwebs. A name that can have totally innocent or meaningless connotations in one language can appear amusing when viewed in another language

Slide07

Naming a village at the bottom of a hill half way along a traditional 12 mile race from the town of Newmarket seemed perfectly rational in the 1840’s and it’s only today that the name probably induces a snigger or two

Slide08

The same probably goes for a town believed to be named after Focko, a Bavarian nobleman in the 6th century. Today this Austrian town is more noted for having it’s signs regularly stolen and vain, but apocryphal efforts to rename the town to Fugging Slide09

The word ‘intercourse’ used to mean ‘fellowship’ and ‘social interaction’. It still does, but there’s another colloquial meaning that makes English language speakers snigger. Of course, it’s the former meaning of the word that forms the etymology of the Lancaster County Pennsylvania town.

Slide10

And if you live near an area of coastline which relies on fishing, it’s totally natural to name your town after a suggestively shaped piece of wood that you would use to pivot the oar on your fishing boat. At least that’s what people would commonly understand the name of this town in Newfoundland to mean in 1711 which is the first recorded instance of this name for this town in this area.

Slide11

There’s a lot more of them … I know of at least 250 more, some more prosaic than others and some more profane than others.

Slide12

For a long time I’ve had a list of these, sitting in a file on my laptop. The product of a Friday afternoon when someone I worked with thought that cataloguing the rude place names in our geographic data set would be a really good idea. And there the file sat, taking up a small amount of disk space.

Slide13

And then someone, actually this someone, said some fateful words to me …

Slide14

And so I did … in 8 easy steps

Slide15

Step 1. Make coffee. An essential element to any form of geographic or cartographic endeavour.

Slide16

Thus fortified I moved onto step 2; trying to geocode the raw data and weed out those places which seemed to be more a product of wishful thinking than any geographical reality. I now had a basic list of place names, long/lat coordinates and the full name of the place according to the geocoder.

Slide17

Step 3 was to convert this raw list of names and coordinates into something that I could manipulate easily and so with the help of a couple of hacked together command line scripts which made use of PHP’s built in JSON encoding, I was able to spit out a file in GeoJSON

Slide18

… which looked something like this. a FeatureCollection array containing a the coordinates and formatted labels for each place name.

Slide19

Step 4 was to select a mapping API which could easily handle GeoJSON. Most modern APIs do but I’d wanted an excuse to play with Leaflet and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to do so. Leaflet also has a simple and flexible way to convert GeoJSON into a series of push pins or polygons on a map canvas. The only thing I was less than happy with was the map tiles that I’d initially used.

Slide20

Enter Step 5; using a custom OSM derived tile set called Toner from San Francisco’s Stamen.

Slide21

Thus armed with my data in GeoJSON format, my map tiles of choice and a custom push pin icon, all it took was 35 odd lines of JavaScript, plus some supporting HTML and the Vaguely Rude Place Names map was born. But this was still sitting on my laptop …

Slide22

Thankfully I’d registered the geotastic.org domain a while back and this seemed like the ideal place to put the map

Slide23

So to step 6. Open up an SSH connection to one of my web hosts, this one kindly donated as payment in kind for some WordPress hacking for a friend, and push the whole lot onto the public internet.

Slide24

Step 7 was sharing the code and underlying data on GitHub in the vague notion that someone might like this as a working example of a map.

Slide25

And finally step 8 was writing a blog post, tweeting about it and then moving on with life and forgetting about the map.

Slide26

All of this happened on February the 6th. I forgot about the map, forgot about the blog post, forgot about the tweet and got on with my day job

Slide27

But then …

Slide28

Someone pinged me an email which basically said ...

you need to look at Twitter, search for the URL of that map of rude places, see what's happening

Slide29

So I did. People seemed to like the map, or maybe they liked what the map was showing, or both. Who knows? All I know is that it started proliferating across Twitter at a frantic speed. This wasn’t what I expected. This wasn’t what I intended. You put stuff onto the internet to satisfy whatever motive you have, whether it’s to blog, to tweet, to release code on GitHub or any other of the multitude of reasons. Most times it gets ignored. But sometimes, just sometimes, something strikes a chord and you find yourself on the receiving end of the phrase ‘going viral’.

Slide30

Of course, it’s not just individuals who read Twitter. It’s individuals who work for companies that read Twitter as well. Before I knew it the map was appearing in the traditional media as well as social media

Slide31

From the Huffington Post …

Slide32

… the Daily Telegraph

Slide33

… the Independent

Slide34

... and further afield, such as the Sidney Morning Herald

Slide35

… into regional publications such as Germany’s Der Spiegel

Slide36

… and Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet, even if this is a Danish Equivalent of the UK’s red-top tabloids. There’s loads more examples of this that I won’t bore you with, most of them unoriginal pieces that copied and pasted other articles. I even ended up getting interviewed on US and Irish radio chat shows

Slide37

But talking of the tabloids …

Slide38

This also got picked up by the Daily Mail which provided the only negative view of the whole episode. It would have been nice it the journalist responsible could have spelt my name correctly and if you’re going to lift the copy and paste my blog post wholesale, ignore the Creative Commons license that specifies attribution and don’t rewrite it, littering it with other spelling and grammatical errors. But we live in an imperfect world.

Slide39

So what lessons have I learned by making the Vaguely Rude Places map?

Slide40

Firstly, if something’s going to go viral on the interwebs it happens very very quickly and without you necessarily noticing it initially

Slide41

From a minimal number of hits, presumably from Twitter followers and connections on other social networks, things started to take off around February the 10th, peaking on the evening of February 19th with, to me, a staggering 48,000 hits an hour, totally 310,000 hits for that day.

Slide42

Having bandwidth really helps if the equivalent of being Slashdotted happens to you. Thankfully, the geotastic.org domain lives on a server with absolutely no bandwidth restrictions. If I’d have hosted this on my main, paid for, web host, I would have ended up using a year’s worth of bandwidth allocation in less than 48 hours.

Slide43

Since February, my web server's analytics tell me the map has been viewed almost 30 million times; 22.2 million of those in February alone and most people stay and explore for around 5 minutes. Roughly 75% of traffic came from referrals. Surprisingly the lion’s share of referrals were not from Twitter or Facebook but from key worded Google searches. Maybe word of mouth is still more powerful than social media.

Slide44

By March, traffic had ramped down to around 2.2 million hits

Slide45

And this month has so far produced around 96,000 hits, at least when I took this snapshot at the start of the week. Extrapolating this out, it’s not unreasonable to predict around 1 million hits this month but I fully expect this to tail off even further

Slide46

None of this surprises me now, today’s viral hit is quickly forgotten as the next big thing happens and people’s attention goes elsewhere. I’m more than happy about this. I never set out for this to go viral. I never set out to make something that made social media briefly buzz or to get written about in the more traditional press or to end up speaking to people on radio shows. It’s been fun.

Slide47

In fact this has been the most successful thing on the internet I’ve ever done, which probably says something about what I do and about what people seem to like. But now the fuss has died down I’m glad to go back to being someone who makes maps for a living and writes the occasional blog post or PHP or JavaScript code which is usually maps based. The Vaguely Rude Places map turned my life upside down for a few brief weeks. Life goes on and it was good to get back to normal again. And now I leave you with the last word on the subject …

Slide48

… which my old friend and ex-colleague from our time at Yahoo had to say. I think this tweet and the animated GIF of Bert and Ernie sums it all up rather neatly. You can see the full animated GIF here.

Slide49

Thank you for listening

The List Of Basic Human Needs (Fixed)

Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs

In 1943 psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called A Theory Of Human Motivation which set out what he perceived as our basic needs, laid out in a hierarchy.

Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs

Maybe it's time to update Maslow's hierarchy to fit in with the times we live in. Maybe someone's already done this.

Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs (Fixed)

Image Credits: Wikipedia and Geeks Are Sexy (this domain really exists).

After The Missing Manual For OpenStreetMap, Here's The Google Map Maker Version

OpenStreetMap, HERE's Map Creator (which I work on) and Google's Map Maker, anyone with a modern web browser and an internet connection can now help to make maps where previously there were none and to improve and keep maps up to date, which still remains one of the biggest challenges to map making.

There's already been a book about OpenStreetMap, which I wrote about in April of 2011. As far as I know, no-one's written about HERE's Map Creator but for Google's Map Maker there's Limoke Oscar's Instant Google Map Maker Starter.

The growth and uptake of today's internet and web allows us to do a lot of things that were previously the preserve of the professional. You can see this in the rise of words which now have citizen prepended to them. We don't just write blog posts, we're citizen journalists. We don't just take photographs, we're citizen photographers. To this list, we can now add citizen cartographer as well.

With the help of OpenStreetMap, HERE's Map Creator (which I work on) and Google's Map Maker, anyone with a modern web browser and an internet connection can now help to make maps where previously there were none and to improve and keep maps up to date, which still remains one of the biggest challenges to map making.

There's already been a book about OpenStreetMap, which I wrote about in April of 2011. As far as I know, no-one's written about HERE's Map Creator but for Google's Map Maker there's Limoke Oscar's Instant Google Map Maker Starter.

When I wrote about OpenStreetMap; Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World, one of the reasons I liked reading about making maps with OSM in a book was because ...

OpenStreetMap is easy to use, graphical (on the website), comes with multiple discussion and documentation sites and well supported mailing lists; you can always find the answer to your question. But sometimes you don’t know what the question is. Sometimes you just want to read a book.

The same can be said of Instant Google Map Maker Starter. The e-book edition I've just finished reading doesn't appear to have the physical weight and depth of the OSM tome, but that's only to be expected of a book that clearly sets out to be a starter.

Instant Google Map Maker Starter

As a starter, the book describes itself on the cover as short, fast, focused and on all these counts it succeeds admirably. Making, creating and editing a digital map is now massively easier than it was 5 years ago, but it's still not simplicity itself.

When you're setting out, you need to have explained what the difference is between what's in the map, the spatial data of the map itself, and what's on the map, the places or points of interest. You need to know how to use your software tool of choice, be it OpenStreetMap, Map Creator or Map Maker. You need to be shown the shortcuts and how to avoid the inevitable pitfalls.

Limoke obviously knows how to use Google Map Maker and it shows in the clear, concise prose, which educates from the ground up and doesn't once stray into making the reader feel patronised or being lectured.

Maybe I've been spoilt with the depth and coverage of this book's OpenStreetMap counterpart and even though the book is clearly labelled and pitched as a high level starter guide, it left me wanting more. But that's not the fault of the author. Most of what I wanted more of is information that only Google would be able to provide; about why Google Map Maker is open for editing in some countries and about why you have to ask Google to get the data you put in back out. But I would have liked to have seen the author touching on the why of map making as much as the how, which he's admirably written about. Why do people make maps and what motivates them?

Maybe there's a book to be written about this; maybe one day I might even do that.

Organic Pigs Or Organic Pig Waste? Mapping The Pros And Cons Of Each US State

Where you choose to live is always a trade off between the pros and the cons, the good and the bad. It probably comes as no surprise that if you're a resident of Iowa and you have the most organic pigs in the United States you will also have the highest amount of pig waste.

us_bad_NEW_7

But who would have thought that the downside to having the most organic mushrooms is that your state has the most amount of dams in need of repair. Apparently, this is the case if you live in Pennsylvania.

And maybe the cause of the highest binge drinking rate that you'll find in Wisconsin is all those acres of organic corn that's grown in that state.

us_good_NEW_9

A lot of the statistics, from sources including the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, look like they're issued by the Department Of Stating The Obvious and makes me wonder how much the residents of each U.S. State agree with how it's seen that their home State excels or doesn't.

Image Credits: Mother Nature Network.

Mapping Heavy Metal With A Little Help From The CIA

Encyclopedia Metallum detailing the Heavy Metal bands per country and mashing it up with population data from the CIA World Factbook (yes, this really exists) to make a map of Heavy Metal bands, by country, per capita.

If there's an unwritten law of digital map making it is this: given a data set with a geographical element, someone, somewhere, will probably make a map out of it.

A prime example of this law is mining data from Encyclopedia Metallum detailing the Heavy Metal bands per country and mashing it up with population data from the CIA World Factbook (yes, this really exists) to make a map of Heavy Metal bands, by country, per capita.

Heavy Metal Bands, Per Country, Per Capita

While I'm not the biggest fan of heavy rock, the resulting map does, err, rock.

Credit is also due to my lovely wife who, knowing my penchant for all things map related, pointed this out to me in the first place.

Image Credits: Reddit user depo_s via GIS Lounge.

Pigs On A Map

Each time I find a new map I always end up learning something, sometimes directly from the map, sometimes from the content of what the map is trying to show. But I always end up learning something. In the case of this map, from H. W. Hill and Co from Decatur, Illinois circa 1884, I learnt that ...

  • That you really can put pigs on a map.
  • That in the 1880s each US state (apparently) had a nickname for a pig. Or is it that the States have nicknames that are best represented by pigs? Or maybe something else entirely.
  • What a hog ringer is. Apparently it's a device for putting rings in the noses of pigs. Ouch.

03942v

How much use this information will be to me is yet to be decided, but every piece of information you learn might come in useful someday, even from this map.

Image Credits: US Library of Congress.

Map Push Pins vs. Dots? Google Map Engine vs. Dotspotting?

Google launched their Maps Engine Lite beta; a way of quickly and easily visualising small scale geographic data sets on (unsurprisingly) a Google map. The service allows you to upload a CSV file containing geographic information and style the resulting map with the data added to it. I thought I'd give it a try.

I turned to my tried and trusted data set for things like this; a data set I derived from a Flickr set of geotagged photos I'd taken of the London Elephant Parade in 2010. It's a known data source and I know what the results of this data set will give me; it lets me do a reasonably meaningful visual comparison of how a particular product or service interprets and displays the data.

Yesterday, Google launched their Maps Engine Lite beta; a way of quickly and easily visualising small scale geographic data sets on (unsurprisingly) a Google map. The service allows you to upload a CSV file containing geographic information and style the resulting map with the data added to it. I thought I'd give it a try.

I turned to my tried and trusted data set for things like this; a data set I derived from a Flickr set of geotagged photos I'd taken of the London Elephant Parade in 2010. It's a known data source and I know what the results of this data set will give me; it lets me do a reasonably meaningful visual comparison of how a particular product or service interprets and displays the data.

Google Maps Engine

Reading up on Map Engine Lite, I noted that I could only upload a maximum of 100 data points into a layer on the map, which wasn't a problem as my data set is localised to London and contains only 10 pieces of information, one for each photo I'd taken. Once I'd uploaded the data I could style the colours of the push pins and the background style of the map. It looks pretty good, even if you are limited to 100 points per layer and it's for strictly personal and non commercial use only.

But I was sure I'd seen this sort of thing before and I had, in the form of Stamen's Dotspotting. I already had an account with Dotspotting and, even though I'd forgotten about it, I'd previously made a map from my London Elephants data set.

DotSpotting

The parallels are many. Both Map Engine and Dotspotting allow you to upload data in CSV format. Both services try to work out coordinates from the data, if there's no lat/long coordinates already. Both services allow you to style the resultant map.

There are differences. Dotspotting allows you to download your data; it doesn't appear that Google does. Map Engine allows you to style the map markers; it doesn't seem that Dotspotting allows this. Dotspotting supports Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, Flickr and Google My Maps feeds; Map Engine only supports CSV files.

There's also one other key difference; Map Engine was launched yesterday, whilst Dotspotting was launched 2 years ago.

But there's an old saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Re-imagining Berlin's U-Bahn And S-Bahn System

U-Bahn and S-Bahn system in Berlin. The name U-Bahn derives from Untergrundbahn, or underground railway whilst S-Bahn comes from Stadtschnellbahn, or fast city train.

As a general rule of thumb, the London Underground is, as the name suggests, underground in the centre of the city and surfaces as you move into the suburbs. The same can't be said of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, which is underground and overground in pretty much equal measures over a lot of the network.

But this post is not about the official map of Berlin's transport, it's about this, unofficial, map of Berlin's underground and not so underground trains.

This is another mass transit map, but this time it's not of the London Underground system, but the U-Bahn and S-Bahn system in Berlin. The name U-Bahn derives from Untergrundbahn, or underground railway whilst S-Bahn comes from Stadtschnellbahn, or fast city train.

As a general rule of thumb, the London Underground is, as the name suggests, underground in the centre of the city and surfaces as you move into the suburbs. The same can't be said of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, which is underground and overground in pretty much equal measures over a lot of the network.

But this post is not about the official map of Berlin's transport, it's about this, unofficial, map of Berlin's underground and not so underground trains.

Berlin - Octolinear

Not content with reworking London's Underground network maps, Maxwell Roberts has turned his sights on Berlin's, producing not only a rework map which looks very similar to the official London map, but also one which is all curves, with not a straight line to be seen.

Berlin - Curved

I hope that both Berlin's BVG and S-Bahn Berlin are aware of Maxwell's work. As a fairly regular traveller to Berlin, I use the U and S-Bahn a lot and whilst the official map is accurate, it's not the easiest of thing to use at times.

Photo Credits: Maxwell Roberts via The Local.

Are You A Map Maker, A Map Builder, A Map Scripter Or A Map Creator?

a cut out and keep guide to which type of mapper you are.

These days there's so many ways that you can make a map. You can use a Javascript Maps API and put push pins on a slippy map. You can take vector data, transform it into JSON and use a different Javascript API to make an SVG map. You can load data from pretty much any source into either a desktop GIS or a visualisation tool. The possibilities are endless; maybe more endless than you might first assume.

Thierry Gregorius has helpfully put together a cut out and keep guide to which type of mapper you are.

Map Maker Types

There's no one size fits all classification here; I'm probably type 4 (The GMT Map Maker), type 5 (The D3 Map Maker) and type 9 (The Native Map Maker) in pretty much equal measures, verging into type 3 (The R Map Maker) and with delusions of being slightly type 1 (The GIS Map Maker). Which types are you?

Photo Credits: Thierry Gregorius on Flickr.

Unsolicited But Targeted Email That Fails In So Many Ways

Like most people, my email Inbox gets hit with a lot of spam on a daily basis. Most of this is caught by my email client's junk mail filtering, but some gets through. Most of it is, at face value, auto generated; phishing attempts for bank accounts I don't have or solicitations for advance fee fraud.

SPAM

But there's also been a recent spike in people wanting me to embed infographics or links into one of my sites that the sender thinks my readers might like. Most of these are so off target as to be ignored, but sometimes there's a mail that seems to have come from a human and might even be relevant to what I write about, but that just fails on so many levels. This is one such email, redacted to save the originating sender and company from any embarrassment.

Subject: Question about garygale.com

Hello,

I was wondering if it would be possible to suggest a link for your website at;

https://www.garygale.com/

Our site [name redacted] ([URL redacted]) is a road travel reporting website, that provides our users with the most up-to-date road traffic information. Our data is updated every 5 minutes using sensors placed on motorways and common A / B roads.

I feel it might be a useful resource for your readers.

Many thanks for your consideration.

Kind Regards, [name redacted]

[name redacted] [email address redacted] [URL redacted]

The email looks like it's been written by a human and it's even grammatically correct and without the usual spelling howlers that characterise spam emails. But deconstruct the email and you can start to see how it just won't achieve its purpose.

Hello,

Hello to you too. I do have a name. It's Gary. It's the name in the email address you've just sent this to and it's also the name in the domain name and in the text of the site you're recommending I put your service's link on. So why not use my name? No matter, let's move on.

I was wondering if it would be possible to suggest a link for your website at; https://www.garygale.com/

This is definitely one of my sites; so suggest away.

Our site [name redacted] ([URL redacted]) is a road travel reporting website, that provides our users with the most up-to-date road traffic information. Our data is updated every 5 minutes using sensors placed on motorways and common A / B roads.

Now the fun starts. The site at www.garygale.com is a personal vanity page; it contains information about me and links to other stuff about me, such as this blog, my Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn profiles. There's not a single link on the site that isn't either directly about me and maintained by me or that I haven't had a personal involvement in. Why would I put a link to a product or service on this site? If anything, this blog might be a better target.

But even then, I might write about things I find interesting, which are usually geographical or map related, but I've never once, as far as I know, written about road traffic data or services.

So I go and look at the site I'm being recommended to link to. It's got a map on it and it looks like it does what it says ... provides live road traffic information in the UK. It links to the UK Highways Agency, which gives it a sheen of authenticity.

There's a Twitter account too. It only has 4 Tweets and two of those are saying the service is down.

But the rest of the website is covered with links to online betting sites, euphemistically referred to as gaming sites as well as car insurance reselling sites. This is looking less and less like something I'd want to be associated with.

I feel it might be a useful resource for your readers.

Why? I've never written about road traffic data. If my readers want to gamble online, surely they can find sites which offer this? Why not a single reason as to why this might be a useful resource?

The simple answer is that this isn't a useful resource. The spam email looks authentic but even if there is a real human behind this, then they haven't even bothered to see whether what is being promoted is a good fit with what I write about or whether it's relevant or not.

Many thanks for your consideration.

Congratulations are in order. You've piqued my attention for about 2 minutes, but then, as is the fate of spam messages, I moved the mouse pointer to the button Mark Selected Message As Junk and just ... clicked.

Photo Credits: AJ Cann on Flickr.

The Great British Map; Or Great Britain vs. The United Kingdom vs. The British Isles

another map. It tries to answer some of more perplexing and confusing facets of the geography surrounding the world's 9th largest island. I mean of course Great Britain. No, wait. I mean the United Kingdom. No, wait. I mean Britain. Or do I mean England? See, it's confusing.
  • So if the ISO 3166-2 code is GBR, how come the country is called the United Kingdom?
  • But if England is a country and the United Kingdom is a country, how come England is part of the United Kingdom?
  • What about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

This isn't the first time I've covered this topic. The first time was for a post on the now defunct Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog entitled UK Addressing, The Non Golden Rules Of Geo Or Help! My Country Doesn't Exist. The ygeoblog.com domain is now long gone and redirects to the Yahoo! corporate blog but I was able to reproduce this post here and it's also captured in the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine. The second time was when I made a variation of The Great British Venn Diagram. But this is the first time (though probably not the last) that I've used a map, which is odd as this is something that's tailor-made for a map.

Last night I made another map. It tries to answer some of more perplexing and confusing facets of the geography surrounding the world's 9th largest island. I mean of course Great Britain. No, wait. I mean the United Kingdom. No, wait. I mean Britain. Or do I mean England? See, it's confusing.

This isn't the first time I've covered this topic. The first time was for a post on the now defunct Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog entitled UK Addressing, The Non Golden Rules Of Geo Or Help! My Country Doesn't Exist. The ygeoblog.com domain is now long gone and redirects to the Yahoo! corporate blog but I was able to reproduce this post here and it's also captured in the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine. The second time was when I made a variation of The Great British Venn Diagram. But this is the first time (though probably not the last) that I've used a map, which is odd as this is something that's tailor-made for a map.

I'd been looking for a good source of geographic vector data that I could use to easily overlay polygons on a map and came across a rich source of free vector and raster map data from Natural Earth. But instead of overlaying that data on top of a standard slippy map using a JavaScript maps API to tap into a tile server's bitmap tiles, I soon wondered whether I could actually make a map from the vector data. It turned out I could and decided to revisit the structure of the group of islands I live on one more time and try to visualise the difference between Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the British Isles. The end result, punningly entitled the Great British Map, looks something like this ...

Great British Map

When the page first loads you'll see the coastlines of Britain, Ireland and towards the bottom, the Channel Islands. There's then five ways of looking at this particular map.

There's the group of geographic islands that's termed the British Isles; these show up in purplish-grey and if you're observant, the Channel Islands vanish as they're not part of this island group.

Great British Map - Great Britain

Then there's the individual geographic islands of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle Of Man and The Channel Islands; these show up in green.

Great British Map - United Kingdom

There's two sovereign states, The United Kingdom of Great Britain And Northern Island and the Republic Of Ireland; these show up in red.

Great British Map - England

Next comes the administrative countries which make up the United Kingdom; England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These show up in yellow.

Great British Map - Crown Dependencies

Finally, there's the Crown Dependencies, the self governing possessions of the British Crown; the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are these and they show up as purple.

What's missing from the map? The British Overseas Territories, which is a polite way of saying what's left of the British Empire that didn't gain independence and which the United Kingdom still asserts sovereignty over. These are Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St. Helena, Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

If you're interested in how I actually made the map, read on.

The source data from the map are two public domain datasets from Natural Earth; the 1:10m map Admin 0 Subunits dataset and the 1:10m Populated Places dataset. This data includes shapefiles which can be converted into GeoJSON format by the GDAL ogr2ogr command line tool. I extracted the vectors for the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Islands from the Admin 0 Subunits dataset, keying on their ISO 3166-1 Alpha-3 country codes.

$ ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON -where "adm0\_a3 IN ('GBR','IRL','IMN','GGY','JEY','GBA')" subunits.json ne\_10m\_admin\_0\_map\_subunits/ne\_10m\_admin\_0\_map\_subunits.shp

I then extracted the place data from the Populated Places dataset, again extracting data for the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Islands, this time keying on their ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 country codes. Not entirely sure why one dataset uses Alpha-2 and the other uses Alpha-3 but go figure; the data is free, accurate and open so who am I to complain?

$ ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON -where "iso\_a2 IN ('GB','IM','JE','GG') AND SCALERANK < 8" places.json ne\_10m\_populated\_places/ne\_10m\_populated\_places.shp

Finally, I merged subunits.json and places.json into a single TopoJSON file, with the added bonus that TopoJSON is much much smaller than GeoJSON. The source GeoJSON weighed in at 549 KB whereas the combined TopoJSON is a mere 78 KB.

$ topojson --id-property su\_a3 -p NAME=name -p name -o great-british-map.json subunits.json places.json

The main reason for use of TopoJSON is not that it's much more lightweight than GeoJSON, but that Mike Bostock's excellent D3 JavaScript library can easily slurp in TopoJSON and inject SVG straight into an HTML document. Which is precisely what the map's underlying code does. There's a lot more that D3 could do with this map, but it's early days and for a first step into a new maps library, I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out.

Speaking of code, it should come as no surprise that the map's code base is available on GitHub. The Great British Map is based on great D3 tutorial that Mike has written on vector mapping using Natural Earth, so the similarity between Mike's map and my map is entirely intentional.

You Were Here; Mapping The Places I've Been To According To Foursquare

another map. While I don't think for one moment this one will be as wildly popular as my last map was, this one is just as satisfying and a whole lot more personal.

At 8.01 PM on the 11th. of October 2009 I checked into Sushi Tomi in Mountain View, California. This was my very first Foursquare check-in. Since then I've checked-in on this particular location based service a further 12,394 times. Each check-in has been at a place I've visited. As this is a location based service, each check-in comes with a longitude and latitude.

This sounded to me like an ideal candidate for a map. But how to go about making one?

Over the weekend I made another map. While I don't think for one moment this one will be as wildly popular as my last map was, this one is just as satisfying and a whole lot more personal.

At 8.01 PM on the 11th. of October 2009 I checked into Sushi Tomi in Mountain View, California. This was my very first Foursquare check-in. Since then I've checked-in on this particular location based service a further 12,394 times. Each check-in has been at a place I've visited. As this is a location based service, each check-in comes with a longitude and latitude.

This sounded to me like an ideal candidate for a map. But how to go about making one?

Checkins - Global

I could have written some code to use the Foursquare API, but I've been running an instance of Aaron Cope's privatesquare for a couple of years now, which meant every check-in I've ever made, give or take the last 6 hours or so, is sitting comfortably in a MySQL database.

So I wrote some code to go through the database, extract each checkin and make a list of each place I'd checked into, the place's coordinates, the place's name and how many times I'd checked into that place. Armed with this information, I could then spit this out in GeoJSON format, which made making a map no more complicated than some mapping API JavaScript, in this case the Leaflet API. OK. There was some slight complication. I need to do some cleverness to make each checkin a CircleMarker, where the radius of the circle was proportional to the number of check-ins. Thankfully Mike Bostock's D3 library does this with ease.

It's not the most classy of visualisations. But I do like that the map shows me the global picture of where I've been over the last 4 or so years. As you zoom into the map, it's fascinating to see the patterns of my movements in areas I seem to go to on a regular basis, such as the San Francisco Bay Area ...

Checkins - Bay Area

... or Berlin ...

Checkins - Berlin

... or even Dar Es Salaam ...

Checkins - Dar Es Salaam

... as well as my journeys around my home country.

Checkins - UK

But there's still a lot of things that the map doesn't do.

The z-index, or stacking order, of the markers is based on each place's coordinates; ideally this will be adjusted so that the larger markers, those with the most check-ins, stack underneath the smaller ones so they're not obscured. I also want to add the ability to see some form of timeline and add some richer data about each place to the marker's popups.

But for now, it does the job I set out to do and to make life easier, should you wish to do the same, you'll find the source code up on GitHub.

What next? Well, now that I can download my Twitter history, I think all of my geotagged tweets are suitable candidates for some mapping ...

Literally A Map Of Riches

This map however, is not a pointer to riches, instead it's made of riches.

A large-scale, unique and intricate portrait of our Earth - a planet which is surely a jewel of the universe - innovatively created from 330,000 hand-cut pieces of stained glass, 1238 jewels totalling 260 carats, and over 6900 LEDs.

Most maps are pointers to something; from today's turn-by-turn voice guided navigation to the "X marks the spot" treasure maps of legend.

This map however, is not a pointer to riches, instead it's made of riches.

A large-scale, unique and intricate portrait of our Earth - a planet which is surely a jewel of the universe - innovatively created from 330,000 hand-cut pieces of stained glass, 1238 jewels totalling 260 carats, and over 6900 LEDs.

chrischamberlainjeweloftheuniverse1

I've written before about maps as art, but this is both a map, a work of art and the map as art and with a tip of the hat to Sitaram Shastri for the heads up. Check out jeweloftheuniverse.net for loads more pictures of this gorgeous map.

Gravity Sucks But It Sucks Variably (Also Available As A Map)

As children we all learn the hard way that gravity sucks though a succession of scraped and bruised knees and elbows. We probably also learned in physics lessons that there's the gravitational constant, denoted by a capital G.

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But what I certainly didn't learn was that while gravity sucks, it doesn't suck consistently. In fact, gravity sucks variably, as this 2010 map from ESA's Goce (Gravity field and Ocean Circulation Explorer) satellite shows.

goce_gravity_field_786map

So it should come as no surprise that not only does gravity suck variably on Earth, it also sucks variably on the Moon.

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This map comes from two NASA probes, Ebb and Flow, which formed part of the agency's GRAIL (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory) project. Ebb and Flow spent 351 days orbiting in formation around the Moon before crashing to the surface at the end of 2012.

So gravity still sucks; it just sucks variably.

Image Credits: Wikipedia, ESA and NASA.

Mapping Meteor Strikes; There's A Lot More Than You'd Think

meteor that exploded over and hit the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals made several thoughts go through my mind. In this order.
  1. I feel for the 1200 people who were hurt and injured
  2. Thank goodness it didn't happen where I live
  3. With all the asteroids and smaller pieces of rock zooming over our head, this has got to have happened before, hasn't it?

Last week's 10,00 ton and 55 feet's worth of meteor that exploded over and hit the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals made several thoughts go through my mind. In this order.

  1. I feel for the 1200 people who were hurt and injured
  2. Thank goodness it didn't happen where I live
  3. With all the asteroids and smaller pieces of rock zooming over our head, this has got to have happened before, hasn't it?

On the subject of the last thought, it turns out this has happened before. A few times. Actually close to 35,000 times. The Meteoritical Society has a data set detailing these. It would make a great map. Which is exactly what Javier de la Torre, co-founder of CartoDB has done.

Meteor Map - Global

A map of impact points would be effective enough, but Javier's use of a heatmap not only shows the global spread of the debris which has been raining down on our planet since 2,300 BC but also shows the density of strikes, which makes the map simultaneously more effective and accessible.

Meteor Map - UK

There's also been far more strikes in the United Kingdom than I would have either thought or feel vaguely comfortable about, if you can ever be comfortable with things falling from the sky with horrifying effect.

Definitely a map to file under the I wish I'd done that category.

RIP FireEagle. You Shall Share Location No More

wrote some words that at the time seemed full of hope for the future of the Geotechnologies group I'd left.

I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

Time and changes of corporate heart have not been kind here. Maybe it's time to take a look at the state of the geo union.

Back in 2010, when I left Yahoo! to go and join Nokia, I wrote some words that at the time seemed full of hope for the future of the Geotechnologies group I'd left.

I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

Time and changes of corporate heart have not been kind here. Maybe it's time to take a look at the state of the geo union.

YQL. The Yahoo! Query Language. Still here although I haven't used it in anger for several years as the service was frequently down.

Yahoo! Maps and the Yahoo! Maps API. RIP. Yahoo! Maps is now run by the back-end services of Nokia, my current employer and the Yahoo! Maps API finally got switched off in November 2012.

Placemaker and PlaceFinder. Still here. Sort of. Placemaker is now Placespotter and while PlaceFinder keeps its name they're both part of Yahoo! BOSS Geo, which means if you want to use them it's time to dig into your wallet for your credit card as they're no longer free to use.

GeoPlanet. Still here. Still free. You have to ask the question for how long though.

WOEIDs. Still here and although you can still use WOEIDs through the GeoPlanet and Flickr APIs, the GeoPlanet Data download remains offline, although see also the fact that there's no delete button for the Internet. WOEIDs are probably not going to go anywhere soon as Yahoo's geotargeting platform depends on them. For now.

YUI. Still here and open sourced on GitHub.

Flickr. Still here, used on a regular basis by me and even flourishing with a renewed iPhone app and a horde of refugees from Instagram after that service's on, off, on again change of licensing terms in December 2012.

Delicious. Still here and still used on a relatively regular basis by me but no longer owned or operated by Yahoo! who sold it to AVOS in 2011.

Did I mention that the old Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog, after years of being down, now redirects to the Yahoo! corporate blog? No? Well it does.

And now it seems that another of Yahoo's geo products has finally done to the deadpool as FireEagle finally stops sharing people's locations and Tom Coates, who I remember discussing what would become FireEagle over coffee back when we both worked at Yahoo, was in a sanguine mood on Twitter.

Tom Coates - FireEagle

The fate of FireEagle has long been been in the balance since it was mentioned as one of the products due to be sunsetted or merged with another product in 2010. The merging never happened and now FireEagle is no more.

Which is a great shame as FireEagle was way ahead of its time and in today's age of location based services and social media sharing, the need for a way to share your location that makes sense for both the privacy of individuals and for businesses is needed more than ever.

If anyone's looking to resurrect the notion of FireEagle, hopefully you'll be the first to let me know.

The Ubiquitous Digital Map (Abridged)

SyncConf was taking place and I'd been asked by ex-MultiMapper and co-founder of SyncConf, John Fagan to do a talk on something related to maps. How could I refuse?

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SyncConf isn't a maps conference or a geo conference; it's a tech conference for the city's tech and startup community. So it seemed to make sense not to go full-on maps nerd for the conference audience but instead look at how we got to the current state of play where the digital map has become ubiquitous. It also allowed me to the opportunity to put a little bit of map porn into a slide deck.

This is how it turned out .. my slide deck and notes follow after the break.

A lot of great conferences in the UK happen in London. But not all great conferences. For some, you have to travel a little further afield. Maybe to East Anglia. Or more specifically to Norwich, the county town of Norfolk. If you were in Norwich last week, you might have noticed that SyncConf was taking place and I'd been asked by ex-MultiMapper and co-founder of SyncConf, John Fagan to do a talk on something related to maps. How could I refuse?

3347163776

SyncConf isn't a maps conference or a geo conference; it's a tech conference for the city's tech and startup community. So it seemed to make sense not to go full-on maps nerd for the conference audience but instead look at how we got to the current state of play where the digital map has become ubiquitous. It also allowed me to the opportunity to put a little bit of map porn into a slide deck.

This is how it turned out .. my slide deck and notes follow after the break.

Image Credits: Denise Bradley, Eastern Daily Press.

20130315-syncconf-slide01 20130315-syncconf-slide02

So, hello, I’m Gary and I'm from the internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo- technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Global Community Programs for HERE, Nokia’s maps group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council and Executive for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference, a committer to the Mapstraction open source maps API and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

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This is the abridged version of this talk; the original is a whole lot bigger but I’ve been warned that there’s a speed limit for slides in this county so I’ve had to pare the talk down and I’ll try hard not to exceed the slides-per-minute rate.

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There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it'll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear on my blog. That’s an upper case “I” and an upper case “S” at the end of the URL by the way ...

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Before I go any further I need to thank this man, Steven Feldman. There’s a lot of maps history in this talk and while it’s easy to get hold of snapshots of how the web looks right now, it’s less easy to get hold of snapshots about how the web used to look. So I’m thoroughly indebted to Steven for allowing me to rummage through his collection of digital maps history.

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As the name of this talk probably suggests, there’s a lot of maps in the slide to come. Some people have called previous talks I’ve done map porn. This is true and I make no apology for it.

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As the name of this talk probably suggests, there’s a lot of maps in the slide to come. Some people have called previous talks I’ve done map porn. This is true and I make no apology for it.

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This isn’t the earliest map but it’s one of the earliest that’s recognisable as a map; it’s of the world as the Babylonians thought of it. Babylon is in the centre of the map and there's seven triangular islands, 3 of which are missing due to damage, in the "river of bitter water", or the sea. To me, the Babylon map is both art, hope and inspiration for the unmapped areas of their world and the best attempt of the age to be authoritative.

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Fast forward several centuries to the "golden age of exploration" and while maps are more recognisably accurate, they're also art. But this art came at a price. You needed to be wealthy to commission such a map and such a map was often given as a notional gift to the rich and powerful to curry favour.

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Furthermore maps were state secrets; sharing maps was sharing power and influence. The entrepreneurs of the time were the great navigators like Columbus and Magellan, their sponsors were kings and countries; their business plan were maps.

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But maps don't just have to be geographically accurate. They can show data as well. This 1869 map by Charles Minard shows the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in his 1812 Russian campaign. Beginning at the Polish/Russian border on the led, the thick pinkish band shows the size of the army as they advanced towards Moscow. The thinner black band shows the ever decreasing size of the remains of the army as they retreated in the bitterly cold winter.

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Another type of not necessarily geographically accurate map are the familiar mass transit and metro maps that you probably all recognise, all descended in some shape or form from Harry Beck's iconic map of London's Tube system.

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So we have maps trying to tell the story of the world. Maps as art. Maps as power. Maps to get you around a city by train. But if you wanted to get around on foot or by car, up until just over 10 years ago, if you lived in a major metropolitan area you probably went around with a city street atlas, such as this one from London, with you.

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I lugged one of these around for the best part of two decades, getting ever more battered and worn and filled with hand written navigation notes on how to get from A to B.

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Then rather than carry around a local street atlas, people started instead to carry round a laser printed copy of the web map for where they wanted to go. Its this digital web map that I want to talk about

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So fast forward to the early days of the internet, before the World Wide Web was formed, before people started to recognise URLs and web site addresses, before smartphones and tablets ...

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Just like people questioned why you’d want to put a camera in a mobile phone, the early days of digital maps were met with incredulity by traditional map makers. Why on earth would you put a map onto a computer when you could carry a printed map out into the street with you. And while we take modern digital maps pretty much for granted, on our laptop and desktop, on our smartphone and on our tablets, they’ve actually been around a lot longer than most people realise ...

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The story of the digital map starts over 30 years ago in the mid to late 1980’s. In 1984 a company called TeleAtlas formed in the Netherlands and the following year another company called Navtech formed in Silicon Valley. Both made rudimentary digital map data and TeleAtlas’s data would form part of ETAK, the first in-car navigation system.

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In 1989 the rollout of the US controlled Global Positioning System starts. These days we know this as GPS.

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Then, in 1991, at Cern in Switzerland a man called Tim Berners-Lee started to link a web of documents together and on this very NeXT cube (formed by Steve Jobs after he’d been ousted from Apple), the first webserver and web site was born and the World Wide Web officially started.

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Mid 1993 and the final of the first set of GPS satellites were launched and the same month the first web server that served up maps went online; the Xerox PARC Map Viewer. These were static maps with none of the clicking, tapping, dragging, panning and zooming that we associate with online maps today.

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In 1995, MultiMap launched. This is important. We tend to think of digital maps as being a purely Silicon Valley product thanks to Yahoo, Google and the like. But MultiMap was a pioneer and more importantly, it was a British pioneer.

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MapBlast! was a web mapping service launched in the mid-1990s by Vicinity Corporation. It allowed website owners to incorporate maps in their own web pages, and was later syndicated across most major Web, wireless, handheld and interactive TV platforms including Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, ATT Interactive and Palm, among others. By 2000, MapBlast was the #2 mapping site on the Web

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In 1996, MapQuest started; a subsidiary of R. O’Donelly that produced maps for the Blue Pages, the local information section at the front of US phone directories. MapQuest launched the first commercial web maps application. You could now put maps and other map related content on web sites. The maps came from Navteq and other sources, including MapQuest’s own. The Automobile Association of America were an early customer with a very primitive form of turn-by-turn navigation; you called the AAA, told them your route and they printed a map for your journey.

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So we now have early digital maps. But they were small maps. Converting map vector data to raster images took time, the bigger the image the more time it took. Bandwidth over dial up modems also meant that putting a map in a browser was slow. So digital maps were small; they were quicker to produce and they downloaded quicker. They were also ugly maps; a stock cartography style and, in the UK, the dominance of OS map data didn’t make the maps appealing to the eye. Browsers were primitive compared with today and map functionality was very limited; no panning or zooming here. Even MultiMap used this way of producing digital maps though they did a much better job of it than most.

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In 1997, MapXsite launched; the first dedicated web maps app for locating local stores and businesses, paving the way in the future for 100’s of Starbucks coffee store locator apps.

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By February 1999, MapQuest had served up 76.2M maps and was the number 5 travel/tourism site on the web according to Media Metrix Inc. May 1999 and MapQuest goes public and raises $69M USD into the bargain. In July Microsoft sells its SideWalk property to TicketMaster and gets out of web mapping, starting the company’s on, off, on again affair with maps.

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December 1999 and AOL buys MapQuest for $1.1Bn. That’s a £1,031M increase in less than 12 months. This is the start of the dot-com boom madness. Bear in mind that MapQuest were largely making money on B2B deals; their consumer web site was loosing money fast.

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February 2000 and Vicinity goes public, raising $120M and peaking at a market cap of $2BN before dropping by 25%. Vicinity were trading as 160 times their revenue and losing over $1M a month at the time.

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Up until 2000 there was two sorts of GPS signal – a degraded civilian one and and an accurate military one. This difference stopped in May 2000. As a result GPS starts to become widespread in civilian devices, leading to the explosion of personal satnav devices and the presence of GPS in our smartphones

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This isn’t really web maps but it’s interesting as a taste of things to come. MultiMap launches a WAP service using TeleAtlas street level maps with travel directions, aerial imagery and London Underground maps. Suddenly everyone’s talking about mobile but due to a lack of mobile data bandwidth, a lack of applications and a lack of battery life, mobile won’t take off for another 7 or 8 years.

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By March 2000, dot com madness is in full swing. The value of map data was completely distorted by the licensors; compare and contrast with the ridiculous prices paid for 3G licenses in the UK. Most of the original maps start-ups will go out of business as a result of the dot com boom turning into the dot bomb crash.

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April 2002 and Microsoft is back in the mapping game with MapPoint.

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October 2002 and Microsoft buys Vicinity, which already had $80M in the bank from its IPO for $96M. A great deal for Microsoft, or pouring money down the drain?

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By 2003 MultiMap had served up over 1Bn maps!

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Not many people realise that Yahoo were the first people to launch slippy maps, where you can click and drag to pan and zoom the map, and integration with search. One of the original engineers behind Vicinity jumped ship to help Yahoo! launch their maps; I worked with him whilst I was at Yahoo! and he’s still there.

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By 2004 things are changing and starting to morph into what we now recognise as today’s web map landscape and players. Google launches Local, searching local business listings and displaying the results on a map. Sounds familiar? It’s worth noting that in 2003-2005 Google used MapQuest for their maps.

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Towards the end of 2004 and maps are the most popular online activity according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project survey. Email and online chat was number 2.

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The same month, a man called Steve Coast presented ideas for a publicly editable map of the world ... OpenStreetMap ... at EuroFOO after being inspired by the success of Wikipedia and a growing frustration with the license around proprietary data in general, but in the UK in particular.

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October 2004. Google acquires Where 2 technologies, getting a tile server that was capable of serving up map tiles to a desktop client, with early use of AJAX. At the same time, the cost of data storage falls to < $0.50 a GB (today’s prices are closer to $0.07 a GB) ... suddenly storing all of that map data becomes cheaper and easier.

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The same month, Google also acquires Keyhole and 9 months later Google Earth launches.

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Despite being phenomenally popular, web maps were limited by complexity, cost and lack of interaction. Developing a web map app was complex, needing expensive maps and knowledge of how to manipulate geographic and spatial data sets. Surely there was an easier way to use maps on the web? Then, in 2005, there was.

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February 2005 and Google Maps launches; apparently maps can be fun and useful. Firstly in the US, then in Japan, Canada and the UK.

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2 months later and the first maps mashup emerges; a ride sharing app, built internally at Google using an undocumented API.

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This undocumented API didn’t remain private for long and by June people were discovering it and producing their own mashups, such as Housing Maps and the Chicago Crime Map.

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Google’s technology is being used in a way they didn’t foresee. Google are paying licensing fees for maps data and the unofficial mashups are getting this for free. What should Google do? Slam the door in the faces of this new and rapidly developing way of using maps?

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Instead, John Hanke (ex of Keyhole) formally released the Google Maps API. It made sense. Google needed the internet to grow; more web content to index; more space to place ads on; more brand recognition. What would this free maps API do to the other businesses in this sector? I don’t think they took it too seriously ... at least to start with.

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Google’s Maps API was followed in quick succession by similar offerings from Yahoo! and from Microsoft.

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And as maps APIs explode across the web, the Open Source communities start to take notice too.

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In 2005, O’Reilly publish Web Mapping Illustrated and the first Where 2.0 conference soon follows. 20% of web users are now using online maps.

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In May 2006 a group of OSM mappers took a trip to the Isle of Wight. This is what the OSM map looked like when they arrived. And this is what it looked like 2 days later; completely mapped.

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June 2006 and the Enterprise and Google start to court each other and 24% of web users worldwide are using web maps; that figure increases to 45% in the UK and 40% in the US

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By 2006, web mapping and location technologies are starting to attract the media and with Where 2.0 and Web 2.0 in full swing, the GeoWeb emerges as a term.

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In November the OS demos OpenSpace, even if it did take a year to release.

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In December people start talking about Neogeography

a socially networked mapping platform which makes it easy to find, create, share, and publish maps and places Di-Ann Eisnor

Neogeography means new geography and consists of a set of techniques and tools that fall outside the realm of traditional GIS, Geographic Information Systems. Where historically a professional cartographer might use ArcGIS, talk of Mercator versus Mollweide projections, and resolve land area disputes, a neogeographer uses a mapping API like Google Maps, talks about GPX versus KML, and geotags his photos to make a map of his summer vacation. Essentially, Neogeography is about people using and creating their own maps, on their own terms and by combining elements of an existing toolset. Neogeography is about sharing location information with friends and visitors, helping shape context, and conveying understanding through knowledge of place. Lastly, Neogeography is fun Andrew Turner

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At the start of 2007, Google launches StreetView to an at best indifferent public and at worst to cries of invasion of privacy. Initially using Immersive Media data, soon Google are driving the streets, but with cameras that aren’t only looking from side to side but also up and down.

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The following month Google adds draggable routing to their maps. Originally using Telcontar but replaced with Google’s own technology a year later. As Google’s Ed Parsons notes “routing algorithms aren’t rocket science; by scaling them are”. Notice the continuing pattern here. Google buys technology and then builds on top of it. Other web maps vendors are left trailing by this move.

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By July there’s sufficient OSM users to hold the first annual State Of The Map conference.

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By 2007, there’s 50,000 Google Maps mashups. Google Maps has 71.5M users per month; Google Earth 22.7M users per month

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In 2007 Nokia acquires NAVTEQ and launches Ovi Maps

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The same year, Microsoft is firmly back in the web maps game and acquires MultiMap.

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In 2008 Google wants to save on the costs that its web mapping activities incur. The main cost saver is the licensing fees that Google pays TeleAtlas. Remember those StreetView cameras that were pointing up and down? Google is making their own map?

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Just look at this for a year’s releases to Google Maps, difficult for the other players to keep up! 21 announcements in 1 year! 1. On January 22, 2008, Google expanded the Local Onebox from 3 business listings to 10 2. On February 20, 2008, Google Maps allowed searches to be refined by User Rating & neighbourhoods. 3. On March 18, 2008, Google allowed end users to edit business listings and add new places. 4. On March 19, 2008, Google added unlimited category options in the Local Business Center. 5. On April 2, 2008, Google added contour lines to the Terrain view. 6. In April 2008, a button to view recent Saved Locations was added to the right of the search field. 7. In May 2008, a "More" button was added alongside the "Map", "Satellite", and "Terrain" buttons, permitting access to geographically-related photos on Panoramio and articles on Wikipedia 8. On May 15, 2008, Google Maps was ported to Flash and ActionScript 3 as a foundation for richer internet applications. 9. On July 15, 2008, walking directions were added. 10. On August 4, 2008, Street View launched in Japan and Australia. 11. On August 15, 2008, the user interface was redesigned. 12. On August 29, 2008, Google signed a deal under which GeoEye would supply them with imagery from a satellite and introduced the Map Maker tool for creation of map data. 13. On September 9, 2008, a reverse business lookup feature was added. 14. On September 23, 2008, information for the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority was added.

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And finally in 2009 and in the US at least, Google ways goodbye to TeleAtlas.

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Jul 2010 and MapQuest starts using open source and open data through OpenStreetMap. There’s several drivers here. One is cost. Another is a trial to see how good crowd sourced maps really are. Microsoft follows suite, announcing use of OSM data and OSM’s founder, Steve Coast, joins Microsoft.

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By the end of 2010, 350,000 web sites are using Google’s Maps API

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In 2011, Nokia’s Ovi maps rebrand to Nokia Maps

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Nokia starts to build on the strength of the mapping services gained by acquiring NAVTEQ and partners with Yahoo!, replacing their native maps with Nokia’s own

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And then something happened that really brought the ubiquity of digital maps, on your phone or tablet, to the mainstream media’s attention. All of a sudden tech industry commentators, who should really know better and who had been proclaiming that making maps wasn’t that hard, changed their tune and proclaimed that making usable digital maps was actually hard after all.

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Up to and including version 5, Apple’s iOS had a maps app. It may have been called just “Maps” but it used Google’s mapping technologies on the back end. It was, and up to the end of version 5, remained one of the most popular and often used apps that came on a new iPhone or iPad. But in September 2012 when Apple released iOS 6, the maps app, still called “Maps” was replaced by the much heralded Apple native offering and millions of anguished iOS used cried out ...

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... as they got directed onto the middle of an airport runway

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... as bridges just vanished

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... and as Las Vegas apparently melted under the heat of the midday Nevada sun

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Originally Google was seen by Apple as a partner but for a variety of reasons, including the growth of Google’s Android phone OS, Apple decided to replace Google’s maps with their own. Apple makes an embarrassing public apology and recommends rival mapping platforms including those by Nokia, Microsoft and MapQuest as alternative while they make Apple Maps better.

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In November 2012, Yahoo! finally shuts down their maps API, after partnering with Nokia and NAVTEQ to provide their mapping services. Despite being one of the digital maps pioneers, Yahoo! is out of the maps game.

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Capitalising on the problems surrounding Apple’s maps, Google releases a native iOS app and quickly gains 10M downloads in 48 hours as iOS users sigh with relief.

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Just as with Yahoo!, Microsoft and Bing pretty much exit the mapping game as Nokia takes over their mapping services

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And Nokia maps rebrands as HERE maps in San Francisco

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So that’s the story of the ubiquitous digital map up until the present day. I’ve missed out a lot of other significant developments and milestones in this story but this is the abridged version. But where does the digital map go from here?

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The explosion of maps, location based services and digital cartography has been made possible by several factors ... the ever falling price of data storage. In 1980 a 26 MB disk drive cost $5,000, that’s $193,000 per GB. By 1990, the cost per GB had fallen to $9,000 per GB. In 2000 that cost was down to around $15 per GB and in 2009 a 1 TB drive cost just $75, working out at $0.07 per GB. Over the last 30 years, space per unit cost has doubled roughly every 14 months (increasing by an order of magnitude every 48 months).

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At the same time, CPUs have got faster as Moore’s Law continues to be true and the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. Digital maps take up a lot of data and a lot of computing power to render and this has got progressively easier with each passing year.

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Of course, the best digital maps in the world are severely reduced in effectiveness if the only way people can access them is via a dial up modem, so hand in hand with cheap storage and faster processors, the availability of broadband internet connections and 3G and now 4G mobile data networks have allowed digital maps to become ever more widespread and easier and faster to access.

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Although a lot of the original pioneers have led the playing field, either sinking as part of the dot bomb crash or outsourcing to other maps providers, such as Yahoo! and Microsoft have done

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And although there’s been massive consolidation and concentration in the map market, with Nokia buying NAVTEQ, TomTom buying TeleAtlas, Google making their own maps and OSM generally disrupting everyone

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There’s been an explosion of interest in digital maps and the way in which these maps are used over the last few years

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And we’ve gained a whole new set of terms in the English language into the bargain.

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It’s never been easier to put a map onto a mobile device or onto a web site and companies such as MapBox are capitalising on this by letting you not only make your own maps but also letting you create your own style of maps

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I started this talk with the notion that early maps were art and I think we’ve come full circle, with companies like San Francisco’s Stamen producing maps that are not only effective but are also, to my mind at least visually gorgeous and qualify as art.

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The growth, variety and use of the ubiquitous digital map shows no sign of stopping; I think the state of the map, to steal OpenStreetMap’s conference name, is one with a very bright future indeed.

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Finally, here’s that short URL again ...

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... and thanks for listening

There's More Underneath London Than Just Trains

Oh yes, look. Gary's written yet another post about a map of the London Tube system that he likes. Yawn. Time to move on. But wait ... this may look like a map of the London Underground but it's not.

Now I may have been guilty of wearing my heart on my sleeve slightly too much where variations on a theme of the London Underground map have been concerned; there's at least seven posts on this topic already posted.

Granted, there's the Northern Line on the map; but this is more for a sense of geographical perspective than anything else.

The Hidden City

The blue lines aren't branches of the Piccadilly Line. They're the rivers that have been long lost and yet still run under the streets of London; the Fleet, the Effra, the Westbourne and Stamford Brook. Historical point of note; the Jubilee Line was originally going to be called the Fleet Line, although the path of the line followed the course of the (also buried) Tyburn rather than the Fleet, but was renamed the Jubilee to coincide with the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

Likewise, the orange lines aren't the Overground, they're sewers, nor is the red line the Central Line, it's the Post Office railway or Mail Rail.

So it may look like a map of the Tube, but it's anything but. It's all the work of Richard Fairhurst, who's made a few maps in his time; they're well worth a look.

A Country Size Jigsaw; Mapping How Big Africa Really Is

By the time we leave school, most of us have a elementary knowledge of our planet's geography. We know where the continents are and we know that they're big. I touched on this in a previous post about the Greenland Problem where, despite Greenland having a size of 0.2 million square miles and Africa having a size of 11.6 million square miles, Africa and Greenland appear roughly the same size on most of today's maps.

So we know that Africa is big; 11.6 million square miles of big. But that sort of bigness is difficult to get our heads around. As Douglas Adams once said

Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real 'wow, that's big', time ... just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.

And in the case of Africa, big means that, if you were playing jigsaw puzzles with other countries, you can fit the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, most of Eastern Europe, India, China and Japan into Africa and still have some space left over.

True-size-of-Africa

It's that sort of big. This map infographic from Kai Krause (yes, that Kai Krause) shows this sort of level of big-ness in a way that 11.6 million square miles just can't convey. There's more information on this map, together with an alternate version over at The Economist.

The Internet Seems To Like The Combination Of Maps And Innuendo

maps.geotastic.org/rude/ around lunchtime on the 6th. of February; since then, several things have happened.

Firstly, Eric Rodenbeck, the CEO of Stamen Design, whose map tiles I used on the Rude Map, dropped me an email to say he liked it. I'm a massive fan of the cartography that Stamen produces and this would, alone, be enough to make the making of the map worthwhile.

But then, the URL of the site started proliferating over Twitter ... including Jonathan Crowe, author of the late and utterly lamented Map Room blog.

Oh people of the interwebs; you are indeed a wondrous thing. If you build something and put it up on the internet, you've no expectation that anyone will see it, let alone look at it. But it appears that the combination of innuendo and some vaguely sounding rude place names (actually with some very rude place names) seems to be something that the citizens of the internet actually like.

The map hit the internet at maps.geotastic.org/rude/ around lunchtime on the 6th. of February; since then, several things have happened.

Firstly, Eric Rodenbeck, the CEO of Stamen Design, whose map tiles I used on the Rude Map, dropped me an email to say he liked it. I'm a massive fan of the cartography that Stamen produces and this would, alone, be enough to make the making of the map worthwhile.

But then, the URL of the site started proliferating over Twitter ... including Jonathan Crowe, author of the late and utterly lamented Map Room blog.

Then the map started to get written about. Firstly by The Independent, then by Laughing Squid, Blame It On The Voices, Reddit and io9.

Rude Places Map - The Independent

And it keeps on getting mentions on Twitter, on Google+ and other social networks. According to the server logs, the map's been viewed a staggering (to me at least) 53,000 times; this definitely classes as a first for me. So with tongue firmly in cheek and innuendo firmly in mind, it seems that if you build it, they will come can be the case sometimes.

All of which, makes me wonder ... what should I build a map of next?

GeoPlanet Data Resurfaces For Download; On The Internet Archive

GeoPlanet Data page on Yahoo's Developer Network site and instead of a set of download links, you see "We are currently making the data non-downloadable while we determine a better way to surface the data as a part of the service.".

Although I can't find the originator of the saying that there's no delete button for the internet, it's a saying that's very true. If you put something up on a web site, be it a photo, some text or perhaps a file of geographic data there's a very good chance that someone else has a copy, even if you subsequently take the original down. It's a sort of digital whack-a-mole.

This is all too apparent in the story of Yahoo's GeoPlanet Data download. When I was part of the Yahoo! Geo Technologies team, we released a public download of the Yahoo! WOEID data set, under the CC BY 3.0 license, in 2009 at Where 2.0. More about that license in a moment.

As Yahoo! continues to undergo change under the leadership of Marissa Meyer, the current data file and all earlier versions were taken offline. Visit the GeoPlanet Data page on Yahoo's Developer Network site and instead of a set of download links, you see "We are currently making the data non-downloadable while we determine a better way to surface the data as a part of the service.".

YDN

But the digital mole that is the WOEID data has resurfaced, and versions 7.4 through 7.10 of GeoPlanet Data can now be found on the Internet Archive.

But Yahoo! has taken down the downloads, so how can this happen? That's where the CC BY 3.0 license comes into play. The Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, to give CC BY 3.0 its full name, gives anyone the right to share the data, in other words to copy, to distribute or to transmit the data, providing users of the data attribute it back to Yahoo! Once issued under such a license, it can't be revoked; you may choose to issue a new version under a different license scheme or stop issuing new versions entirely, but the earlier versions remain under the original license.

Internet Archive

I've always had a soft spot for the WOEID and for the GeoPlanet API and data download. Maybe this new availability of the data set will stimulate new usage of WOEIDs. Who knows, the data may even be forked and added to?

Lodged Donor Nun Run; The Anagram Map Of The London Underground

london_underground_anagram_map

It's amazing what you get when you make anagrams out of each and every station on the Tube network.

If you think you know the map of the London Underground network think again. You probably think the Metropolitan Line runs between Amersham and Aldgate; but on this map it doesnt. Instead, it runs between Ram Shame and Data Gel. The southwest termini for the District Line are Richmond and Wimbledon. Maybe not. According to this map, Inch Dorm and Bowel Mind are the end of the line. It's good to know I used to live near Foldaway Rhumba rather than Fulham Broadway, that Nokia's central London office is just by Apt Nodding and I feel sorry for someone who lives near Lancaster Gate, sorry, I mean Castrate Angel.

london_underground_anagram_map

It's amazing what you get when you make anagrams out of each and every station on the Tube network.

Ooh That Sounds Rude; Mapping British Innuendo

many have tried. One thing that lots of people do seem to agree on is that part of being British is a love for and an appreciation of the British sense of humour. This can be roughly and with a sweeping generalisation said to consist of equal parts of finding fun in everyday situations Peep Show), satire and parody (Have I Got News For You), social awkwardness (The Office), surrealism and nonsense (Monty Python) and innuendo (the Carry On films).

Focus on that trait of innuendo for a moment. Could you possibly combine the British fondness for innuendo with geography and put it on a map? It turns out you can. So I did. It may be vaguely NSFW but there's real geographical data behind this.

No-one can really define what being British is, though many have tried. One thing that lots of people do seem to agree on is that part of being British is a love for and an appreciation of the British sense of humour. This can be roughly and with a sweeping generalisation said to consist of equal parts of finding fun in everyday situations Peep Show), satire and parody (Have I Got News For You), social awkwardness (The Office), surrealism and nonsense (Monty Python) and innuendo (the Carry On films).

Focus on that trait of innuendo for a moment. Could you possibly combine the British fondness for innuendo with geography and put it on a map? It turns out you can. So I did. It may be vaguely NSFW but there's real geographical data behind this.

Rude Places Map

Maybe it's part of bring British, but an airport whose code is BUM is just ... funny.

As a classic Web 2.0 style maps mashup, this is never going to win any awards for originality or innovativeness. But the source of each of these vaguely rude sounding names was from Yahoo's WOE data set, before the data was released via the GeoPlanet API and (currently offline) GeoPlanet Data download. A list of real but amusing sounding place names, culled from GeoPlanet by one of the old Yahoo! Geo team, has been sitting in a file on one of my backup drives for too many years now. But given a geographic data set. Stamen's wonderful Toner map tiles and a JavaScript maps API, in this case Leaflet, the temptation to make a map out of it all was just too strong.

Yes it's a map, yes it's geographical innuendo and yes, it's very much part of the British sense of humour. If you're British, try not to snigger too much; if you're not British, just shake your head sadly and mutter "those crazy Brits".

The Problem With Location Based Mobile Services

privacy or tracking. Nor is the problem one of an LBMS dying and going away. The problem isn't whether I can get a good location fix or whether the results I get are accurate or not. The problem isn't even of the value of the data we, the customer, put into a service and whether we can get it back again.

There's a problem with today's crop of location based mobile services, commonly referred to as LBMS; those little apps which sit on our smartphones and allow us to geotag status updates or photos, find relevant local place information or check-in at a place.

The problem isn't one of privacy or tracking. Nor is the problem one of an LBMS dying and going away. The problem isn't whether I can get a good location fix or whether the results I get are accurate or not. The problem isn't even of the value of the data we, the customer, put into a service and whether we can get it back again.

The Internet Connection Appears To Be Offline

No, the problem is whether we can actually use the service from our smartphone at all.

It's 2013 and I live in the suburbs of the capital of the United Kingdom and this happens all the time. Not in the uncharted wilds of the UK. Not in obscure regions of the world. But in my local neighbourhood and in the heart of London. And it's not just a problem with Vodafone, my current cellular provider. Over the last few years I've been on T-Mobile, on Orange and on O2 and all the cellular carriers seem to have exactly the same problem; one which makes a mockery of their coverage maps. According to Vodafone's map, I should be getting high or at least variable 3G data coverage where I live, but instead I get variable or no coverage at all when walking in my local neighbourhoods.

3G data coverage that drops in and out; that's the problem with today's location based mobile services.

I'm getting off of my soapbox now ...

Not A Map On The Internet But A Map Of The Internet

submarine-cable-map-2013

We're all used to seeing maps on the internet, but what about how the internet gets to each and every one of us so that we can see those maps?

submarine-cable-map-2013

There's a map for almost every occasion and this map shows how the internet deals with those problematic moments when you run out of land to bury a cable in, with the added bonus that it's done in a rather nice retro style reminiscent of the glorious maps of the 16th. Century.

Image Credits: Telegeography.

Re-imagining The London Tube Map With Curves And Circles

#mapgasm post. Actually another 2 maps, both of which are by Max Roberts and both of which have appeared on Annie Mole's Going Underground blog.

Continuing my fascination with the map of the London Underground, which I may have posted about before, Max has been wondering what the Tube Map would look like if it was all curved.

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Or maybe, just maybe what it would be like if the Tube Map was circular, in the most literal of fashions.

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I wonder what Harry Beck would think of these re-imaginings of his iconic map; I think he'd probably approve.

Photo Credits: Max Roberts and Annie Mole on Flickr.

Another day, another map and another #mapgasm post. Actually another 2 maps, both of which are by Max Roberts and both of which have appeared on Annie Mole's Going Underground blog.

Continuing my fascination with the map of the London Underground, which I may have posted about before, Max has been wondering what the Tube Map would look like if it was all curved.

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Or maybe, just maybe what it would be like if the Tube Map was circular, in the most literal of fashions.

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I wonder what Harry Beck would think of these re-imaginings of his iconic map; I think he'd probably approve.

Photo Credits: Max Roberts and Annie Mole on Flickr.

The Greenland Problem And Playing With Mercator's Map

writing about map projections is a little bit like waiting for one of London's iconic red buses; you write one and immediately another one comes along. As I mentioned in my last post, rightly or wrongly, the most commonly used map projection is the Mercator projection. It's not without it's problems or detractors.

A Mercator map gets more distorted the further north or south of the Equator you move. This is often referred to as The Greenland Problem. Greenland has an area of roughly 0.8 million square miles. Africa on the other hand has an area of roughly 11.6 million square miles. So on the map Africa should be roughly ten times the size of Greenland. Right?

But on a Mercator map it doesn't appear so; both Greenland and Africa look to be approximately the same size; and don't even get me started on how Antarctica is now smeared across the bottom of the map.

It seems that writing about map projections is a little bit like waiting for one of London's iconic red buses; you write one and immediately another one comes along. As I mentioned in my last post, rightly or wrongly, the most commonly used map projection is the Mercator projection. It's not without it's problems or detractors.

A Mercator map gets more distorted the further north or south of the Equator you move. This is often referred to as The Greenland Problem. Greenland has an area of roughly 0.8 million square miles. Africa on the other hand has an area of roughly 11.6 million square miles. So on the map Africa should be roughly ten times the size of Greenland. Right?

But on a Mercator map it doesn't appear so; both Greenland and Africa look to be approximately the same size; and don't even get me started on how Antarctica is now smeared across the bottom of the map.

The Mercator Projection

A really effective way to show this distortion in action is the Mercator Puzzle by Luke Mahe of the Google Maps Developer Relations Team. Drag and drop the red shapes, which represent countries, around the map; watch them shrink as you near the Equator and expand and distort as you move towards the poles.

The Mercator Puzzle

It's a nice geographical puzzle and an equally nice way of showing Mercator in action; how many of the 15 countries did you manage to find their correct homes for? If you're really stuck, there's a solution here; but no peeking unless you really get stuck!

Picture Credits: Mercator Map Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0.

People Who Care About Map Projections ... And People Who Don't

so many ways of projecting the Earth onto a map. But there's also the one we're all familiar with. It's Gerardus Mercator's Projection and we've been using it, probably without knowing it, since 1569 and it's showing no sign of going away.

Whenever you look at a map, be it on the web, on your mobile or on your wall there's a compromise. The compromise is the map's projection. Or to put it another way, the way in which the roughly spherical lump of rock we live on can be unwrapped and displayed in a flat, two dimensional manner.

There's lots of way of doing this and the ways come with wonderful, almost eccentric sounding names. There's the pseudo-cylindrical projections; Sanson-Flamsteed, Luximuthal or Kavrayskiy's Fifth Projection (no idea what happened to the first four). There's the conic projections; Lambert's Conformal or War Office Polyconic. There's the pseudo-conic projections; Stabius-Werner and Bonne. Or there's the modified azimuthal projections; Wiechel's or Winkel's Tripel Projection.

There's just so many ways of projecting the Earth onto a map. But there's also the one we're all familiar with. It's Gerardus Mercator's Projection and we've been using it, probably without knowing it, since 1569 and it's showing no sign of going away.

So in the end, it all boils down to this ...

Web Maps Projections

... which group are you in?

Cartotastic image fun by Tobin Bradley at Fuzzy Tolerance thanks to CC-BY-SA.

Not Your Average User Contributed Map

2013 - The Year Of The Tangible Map And Return Of The Map As Art

Watercolor, the vast majority of digital maps can't really be classified as art. Despite the ability to style our own maps with relative ease, such as with Carto and MapBox's TileMill, today's maps tend towards the data rich, factual end of the map spectrum. Compare and contrast a regular digital map, on your phone, on your tablet or on a web site in your laptop's browser with a map such as Hemispheriu[m] ab aequinoctiali linea, ad circulu[m] Poli Arctici and you'll see what I mean (and if you don't browse the Norman. B. Leventhal Map Center's Flickr stream you really should).

Looking back at the conference talks I gave and the posts I wrote in 2012, two themes are evident.

The first theme is that while there's some utterly gorgeous digital maps being produced these days, such as Stamen's Watercolor, the vast majority of digital maps can't really be classified as art. Despite the ability to style our own maps with relative ease, such as with Carto and MapBox's TileMill, today's maps tend towards the data rich, factual end of the map spectrum. Compare and contrast a regular digital map, on your phone, on your tablet or on a web site in your laptop's browser with a map such as Hemispheriu[m] ab aequinoctiali linea, ad circulu[m] Poli Arctici and you'll see what I mean (and if you don't browse the Norman. B. Leventhal Map Center's Flickr stream you really should).

Hemispheriu[m] ab aequinoctiali linea, ad circulu[m] Poli Arctici

The second theme is that despite the abundance of maps that surround us these days, a digital map is almost by definition an intangible thing. It's a view port, hand crafted by a digital cartographer, on a mass of hidden, underlying spatial data. It's ephemeral. Switch off your phone, your tablet, your sat nav or your computer and the map ... vanishes. Until the next time you hit the "on" button, the electrons flow again and the map re-appears. But it's still intangible, despite the irony that a lot of maps these days are interacted with via a touch interface; we tap, poke, prod and swipe our maps, but they're not really there.

But maybe 2013 will be both the year of the tangible map and the year of the map as art. It might be if the closing days of 2012 are anything to go by.

On December 8th, 2012, David Overton's SplashMaps made their funding total on Kickstarter. A SplashMap is a real outdoor map, derived from (digital) open data, but rendered on a light and weatherproof fabric. It's a tangible map in the truest sense of the word; one you can fold up or even crumple up and stick in your pocket, safe in the knowledge that it won't fade away. There's no "off" switch for this map. As one of the SplashMap funders, I'll have a chance to get my hands on one in the literal sense of the word in a couple of months, once they hit production. So more about this map in a future post.

The other map that is both 100% tangible and 100% art is the awesomely talented Anna Butler's Grand Map Of London. A modern day map of the UK's capital city, digital in origin, lovingly hand drawn in the style of the 1800s and printed, yes, printed on canvas. It's a map worthy of the phrase "the map as art" and when I first saw one and handled one in late November of 2012 I wanted one, right there and then.

Grand Map Of London

And then, on Saturday, December 29th 2012, Mark Iliffe and I met Anna for a coffee in the Espresso Bar of the British Library on London's Euston Road and out of the blue, Anna handed over a long cardboard tube containing my own, my very own, Grand Map Of London. People nearby looked on, slightly non-plussed as I crowed like a happy baby, promptly unrolled the map over the table and just looked and touched. The next half an hour or so pretty much vanished as I pored over and luxuriated in the map, lost in the details and revelling in the map under my hands. Truly this is a tangible map which is itself art.

I've often said, half in truth, half in jest, that I'd love a big, as big as I can get, map of London on my wall, probably one of Stamen's Watercolor maps. But Anna's Grand Map Of London will be getting a suitable frame and sitting on my wall, just as soon as my local framing shop opens after the New Year break.

Grand Map Of London

Two maps to wrap up 2012. Both tangible, both digital in origin, both made for looking, touching and feeling. One clever, innovative and utterly practical and one a map you can keep coming back to and which reveals more artistic cleverness each time you look at it.

2013 is shaping up to be a "year of the map" in ways I'd never had hoped for at the start of 2012.

Making PostgreSQL, PostGIS And A Mac Play Nicely Together

Which meant I needed to download and install TileMill, an interactive map design tool.

Which meant I needed to learn Carto, the CSS-like language for map styling.

Which meant I looked for a template project so I didn't have to start from scratch.

Which meant I found OSM Bright.

Which meant I needed to start small and find a map extract of Tanzania to work with.

Which meant I needed to install and configure PostgreSQL and PostGIS on my Mac.

Which brings me to the starting point of the journey and the reason for this post in the first place.

Most things in life are a journey and the destination of this particular journey was to try and create a custom map style that represented the unique features and challenges of Tandale.

Which meant I needed to download and install TileMill, an interactive map design tool.

Which meant I needed to learn Carto, the CSS-like language for map styling.

Which meant I looked for a template project so I didn't have to start from scratch.

Which meant I found OSM Bright.

Which meant I needed to start small and find a map extract of Tanzania to work with.

Which meant I needed to install and configure PostgreSQL and PostGIS on my Mac.

Which brings me to the starting point of the journey and the reason for this post in the first place.

When I normally need to install UNIX-y command line and server tools I turn to Homebrew, the tool set that "installs the stuff you need that Apple didn't". Homebrew supports installing both PostgreSQL and PostGIS but a bit of background research showed that installing these on Lion and on Mountain Lion could be problematic. A bit of further research soon turned up Postgres.app, which claims to be "the easiest way to run PostgreSQL on the Mac". Postgres.app is a single shot installer which wraps PostgreSQL and PostGIS into an easy to install and run self contained environment.

Postgres.app

I'm a big fan of this approach to a software development environment. All of the stuff I've put up on GitHub and on WordPress.org has been written using MAMP, the single shot installer which wraps up Apache, MySQL and PHP on the Mac so Postgres.app gave instant appeal to me. So, download, install, start.

Next I found an OSM map extract of Tanzania courtesy of GeoFabrik, which I also downloaded. Now to load the map into PostgreSQL. I made sure my shell's PATH pointed to the command line tools provided by Postgres.app by prepending /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin to the PATH defined in my .bash_profile, ran psql and created a database called tanzania. So far so good.

$ psql
psql (9.2.2)
Type "help" for help.

gary=# CREATE DATABASE tanzania;
CREATE DATABASE
gary=# \q

To load the map into the database I had a choice of two command line tools; Imposm or osm2pgsql. The latter of the two seemed to work out of the box according to the documentation so I used Homebrew to install this tool.

$ brew install osm2pgsql

Now to load the map ...

$ osm2pgsql -c -G -U gary -d tanzania ~/Projects/maps/data/tanzania.osm.pbf 
osm2pgsql SVN version 0.81.0 (64bit id space)

Using projection SRS 900913 (Spherical Mercator)
Setting up table: planet_osm_point
NOTICE:  table "planet_osm_point" does not exist, skipping
NOTICE:  table "planet_osm_point_tmp" does not exist, skipping
SELECT AddGeometryColumn('planet_osm_point', 'way', 900913, 'POINT', 2 );
 failed: ERROR:  function addgeometrycolumn(unknown, unknown, integer, unknown, integer) does not exist
LINE 1: SELECT AddGeometryColumn('planet_osm_point', 'way', 900913, ...
               ^
HINT:  No function matches the given name and argument types. You might need to add explicit type casts.

Error occurred, cleaning up

The lack of the AddGeometryColumn function was the clue here. Whilst Postgres.app may come with PostGIS, my custom database was lacking all the PostGIS functionality. So I deleted my initial database and tried to recreate it with the template_postgis template, which also failed.

$ psql
psql (9.2.2)
Type "help" for help.

gary=# DROP DATABASE tanzania;
DROP DATABASE
gary=# CREATE DATABASE tanzania TEMPLATE=template_postgis;
ERROR:  template database "template_postgis" does not exist
gary=# \q

Updated 24.12.12

As Regina correctly pointed out in the comments, I didn't really need to go through the manual process of loading the PostGIS template, the create extension postgis command in psql would have done this for me much quicker and elegantly, reducing the commands to setup my database to just two statements ...

$ psql
psql (9.2.2)
Type "help" for help.

gary=# CREATE DATABASE tanzania;
CREATE DATABASE
gary=# \connect tanzania;
You are now connected to database "tanzania" as user "gary".
tanzania=# CREATE EXTENSION postgis;
CREATE EXTENSION
gary=# \q

... simple when you know how.

So I needed to create the template_postgis database from scratch, loading in the postgis.sql and spatial_ref_sys.sql SQL files and then recreate my custom database, based on the template contained in the template_postgis database. The PostGIS SQL files are supplied as part of Postgres.app, if you know where to look for them; you'll find them inside the app's container in /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/share/contrib/postgis-2.0.

$ createdb template_postgis
$ createlang plpgsql template_postgis
createlang: language "plpgsql" is already installed in database "template_postgis"
$ psql -d template_postgis -f /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/share/contrib/postgis-2.0/postgis.sql 
SET
BEGIN
CREATE FUNCTION
CREATE FUNCTION
CREATE TYPE
...
COMMIT

$ psql -d template_postgis -f /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/share/contrib/postgis-2.0/spatial_ref_sys.sql 
BEGIN
INSERT 0 1
...
COMMIT
ANALYZE

$ psql
psql (9.2.2)
Type "help" for help.

gary=# CREATE DATABASE tanzania TEMPLATE=template_postgis;
CREATE DATABASE
gary=# \q

Now, at last, I was able to load my Tanzanian map.

$ osm2pgsql -c -G -U gary -d tanzania ~/Projects/maps/data/tanzania.osm.pbf
osm2pgsql SVN version 0.81.0 (64bit id space)

Using projection SRS 900913 (Spherical Mercator)
Setting up table: planet_osm_point
NOTICE:  table "planet_osm_point" does not exist, skipping
NOTICE:  table "planet_osm_point_tmp" does not exist, skipping
Setting up table: planet_osm_line
NOTICE:  table "planet_osm_line" does not exist, skipping
NOTICE:  table "planet_osm_line_tmp" does not exist, skipping
Setting up table: planet_osm_polygon
NOTICE:  table "planet_osm_polygon" does not exist, skipping
NOTICE:  table "planet_osm_polygon_tmp" does not exist, skipping
Setting up table: planet_osm_roads
NOTICE:  table "planet_osm_roads" does not exist, skipping
NOTICE:  table "planet_osm_roads_tmp" does not exist, skipping
Allocating memory for dense node cache
Allocating dense node cache in one big chunk
Allocating memory for sparse node cache
Sharing dense sparse
Node-cache: cache=800MB, maxblocks=102401*8192, allocation method=3
Mid: Ram, scale=100

Reading in file: /Users/gary/Projects/maps/data/tanzania.osm.pbf
Processing: Node(6820k 682.0k/s) Way(980k 16.90k/s) Relation(23580 1122.86/s)  parse time: 89s

Node stats: total(6820388), max(1910954191) in 10s
Way stats: total(980191), max(180648305) in 58s
Relation stats: total(23580), max(2409445) in 21s
Committing transaction for planet_osm_point
Committing transaction for planet_osm_line
Committing transaction for planet_osm_polygon
Committing transaction for planet_osm_roads

Writing way (980k)
Committing transaction for planet_osm_point
Committing transaction for planet_osm_line
Committing transaction for planet_osm_polygon
Committing transaction for planet_osm_roads

Writing relation (23569)
Sorting data and creating indexes for planet_osm_point
Sorting data and creating indexes for planet_osm_line
Sorting data and creating indexes for planet_osm_polygon
node cache: stored: 6820388(100.00%), storage efficiency: 50.68% (dense blocks: 637, sparse nodes: 6403164), hit rate: 99.45%
Sorting data and creating indexes for planet_osm_roads
Analyzing planet_osm_point finished
Analyzing planet_osm_polygon finished
Analyzing planet_osm_roads finished
Analyzing planet_osm_line finished
Copying planet_osm_point to cluster by geometry finished
Copying planet_osm_roads to cluster by geometry finished
Creating indexes on  planet_osm_roads finished
All indexes on  planet_osm_roads created  in 12s
Completed planet_osm_roads
Copying planet_osm_polygon to cluster by geometry finished
Copying planet_osm_line to cluster by geometry finished
Creating indexes on  planet_osm_point finished
All indexes on  planet_osm_point created  in 21s
Completed planet_osm_point
Creating indexes on  planet_osm_polygon finished
All indexes on  planet_osm_polygon created  in 28s
Completed planet_osm_polygon
Creating indexes on  planet_osm_line finished
All indexes on  planet_osm_line created  in 30s
Completed planet_osm_line

Osm2pgsql took 218s overall

One final gotcha awaited though. Restarting Postgres.app later that day made psql fail with an error.

$ psql
psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
    Is the server running locally and accepting
    connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?

Although Postgres.app was running, it looked like the server wasn't. Checking the system error logs via Console.app showed me that my newly populated database was running out of shared memory.

22/12/2012 11:05:44.319 com.heroku.postgres-service: FATAL:  could not create shared memory segment: Cannot allocate memory
22/12/2012 11:05:44.319 com.heroku.postgres-service: DETAIL:  Failed system call was shmget(key=5432001, size=3809280, 03600).
22/12/2012 11:05:44.319 com.heroku.postgres-service: HINT:  This error usually means that PostgreSQL's request for a shared memory segment exceeded available memory or swap space, or exceeded your kernel's SHMALL parameter.  You can either reduce the request size or reconfigure the kernel with larger SHMALL.  To reduce the request size (currently 3809280 bytes), reduce PostgreSQL's shared memory usage, perhaps by reducing shared_buffers or max_connections.
22/12/2012 11:05:44.319 com.heroku.postgres-service:    The PostgreSQL documentation contains more information about shared memory configuration.
22/12/2012 11:20:40.584 com.heroku.postgres-service: server starting

Thankfully this is a known problem; PostgreSQL is really a server application, not a laptop application. The default Mac configuration isn't enough to support a medium sized PostgreSQL database, but adding the following configuration settings to /etc/sysctl.conf, creating it via sudo if it doesn't already exist and rebooting solved that final problem.

kern.sysv.shmmax=1610612736
kern.sysv.shmall=393216
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=8
kern.maxprocperuid=512
kern.maxproc=2048

TileMill - Tanzania

I now have a working PostgreSQL and PostGIS install, with a map loaded, which TileMill can access. Now all I need to do is learn Carto and actually make the map I originally set out to do ... another learning journey has started.

A Year On And Yahoo's Maps API Finally Shuts Down

deadpool. The same applies for APIs and when they finally go offline, they usually end up in the Programmable Web deadpool.

YDN Maps Shutdown

At around 1.30 PM London time yesterday, the Yahoo! Maps API got added to the Programmable Web deadpool for good. Despite the announcement I wrote about last year that it was being shutdown on September 13, 2011, up until yesterday the API was very much alive and well and still serving up map tiles, markers and polylines via JavaScript.

Nothing on the interwebs is forever. Services start up and either become successful, get acquired or shut down. If they shut down they usually end up in TechCrunch's deadpool. The same applies for APIs and when they finally go offline, they usually end up in the Programmable Web deadpool.

YDN Maps Shutdown

At around 1.30 PM London time yesterday, the Yahoo! Maps API got added to the Programmable Web deadpool for good. Despite the announcement I wrote about last year that it was being shutdown on September 13, 2011, up until yesterday the API was very much alive and well and still serving up map tiles, markers and polylines via JavaScript.

Yesterday I was running some tests on the latest pre-release version of Mapstraction, which still supported the Yahoo! Maps API and they were running without error all morning. Then they stopped. The API just wasn't there anymore.

$ wget https://api.maps.yahoo.com/ajaxymap?v=3.8&appid=(redacted) Resolving api.maps.yahoo.com... 98.139.25.243 Connecting to api.maps.yahoo.com|98.139.25.243|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 503 Service Unavailable

A quick look at the API's home on the web at developer.yahoo.com/maps/ajax/ shows an update to the previous shutting down message, with developers now being redirected to developer.here.net, the home of Nokia's new Here Maps API.

So whilst the demise of the Yahoo! Maps API in September of last year proved to be somewhat exaggerated, the plug has now been well and truly pulled.

I'll always have a soft spot for the Yahoo! API; it was the first mapping API I really cut my teeth on and while things change on the interwebs on a daily basis I can't help but feel sadly nostalgic.

This does mean that the next release of Mapstraction will no longer support the Yahoo! Maps API, though it will support Nokia Maps and Here Maps. My signed copy of Charles Freedman's Yahoo! Maps Mashups will also continue to remain on my office bookshelf as a memento.

When Geolocation Doesn't Locate

20121106-165623.jpg

And odd is the only thing you can use to describe the fact that I'm currently sitting in Teddington in Southwest London and thanks to some glitch in the matrix, either Foursquare or my phone's A-GPS seems to think that a voting station in New England, yes, New England USA is close and local to me.

Geolocation is wonderful except when it doesn't.

Geolocation in today's smartphones is a wonderful thing. The A-GPS chip in your phone talks to the satellites whizzing around above our heads and asks them where we are. If that doesn't work then a graceful degrading process, via public wifi triangulation and then cell tower triangulation will tell our phones where we are. Except when something odd happens.

20121106-165623.jpg

And odd is the only thing you can use to describe the fact that I'm currently sitting in Teddington in Southwest London and thanks to some glitch in the matrix, either Foursquare or my phone's A-GPS seems to think that a voting station in New England, yes, New England USA is close and local to me.

Geolocation is wonderful except when it doesn't.

The "Maps As Art" Debate

it's clever, but is it art?".

Even artists can't seem to agree on this topic. Compare and contrast Picasso's comment that "everything you can imagine is real" with Warhol's contrarian stance that "an artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have".

Now add maps into the equation and you have a debate where people probably won't always agree. So it was with a conversation on Twitter between myself, Steve Chilton, chair of the Society of Cartographers and psychogeographer Graham Hooper. We were talking about a map like this one ...

Ah ... art. Art is a contentious area for discussion. One person's work of art is another person's random spots of paint on a canvas. As Rudyard Kipling once put it, "it's clever, but is it art?".

Even artists can't seem to agree on this topic. Compare and contrast Picasso's comment that "everything you can imagine is real" with Warhol's contrarian stance that "an artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have".

Now add maps into the equation and you have a debate where people probably won't always agree. So it was with a conversation on Twitter between myself, Steve Chilton, chair of the Society of Cartographers and psychogeographer Graham Hooper. We were talking about a map like this one ...

Graham kickstarted the discussion with a fear that the ultimate map, by today's standards, is merely more accurate old data in a new format. He's got a point. A lot of today's maps, particularly digital ones, do take existing data and put a subtly different slant on the way that it's visualised. He continued with "surely maps, in the broadest sense, need to add value to what is mapped rather than just copy or repeat it in inferior form".

Here's where the debate gets onto thin ice. The notion of what's inferior is a deeply subjective thing. Likewise, adding value is a much maligned phrase that can mean pretty much anything depending on your interpretation. My ultimate map, if such a thing even exists, will probably differ significantly from yours.

Steve countered with "maps represent the real word, it's not about being inferior; they can categorise, explain, illustrate and open up that world".

The map in question is one of those produced by artPause and Graham questioned whether any of these maps "present a new or better understanding, appreciation or awareness of our world".

I should probably nail my colours to the mast here.

A map can be art. I think I have to side with Steve on this point. Maps as art definitely illustrate our world and they definitely make us appreciate someone else's view of our world. Yes, they're produced from existing data, or at least the current data at the time they were made. But if you like maps, you'll probably like maps as art, even if you sometimes need to put your head to one side, squint a bit and mutter "it's clever, but is it art?".

Photo Credits: artPause and Kaptain Kobold on Etsy.

The London Tube Map Made (Too) Simple

#mapgasm series of posts on maps found on the interwebs that I like. Yes, it's another map. Yes, it's another Tube map. I make no apologies for this.

A simple map is often a good map. Cutting away cartographical clutter can reveal the heart of what a map is trying to show. But sometimes you can maybe take the map pruning just a little bit too far. Take the map of the London Underground; surely one of the simplest and more effective maps there is. Surely there's not much scope for making it any simpler?

This is post number six in the ongoing #mapgasm series of posts on maps found on the interwebs that I like. Yes, it's another map. Yes, it's another Tube map. I make no apologies for this.

A simple map is often a good map. Cutting away cartographical clutter can reveal the heart of what a map is trying to show. But sometimes you can maybe take the map pruning just a little bit too far. Take the map of the London Underground; surely one of the simplest and more effective maps there is. Surely there's not much scope for making it any simpler?

So Hugh Grant is Notting Hill Gate. Dinosaurs is South Kensington. France is King's Cross St. Pancras and Wax Celebs is Baker Street. But the meaning of XXL eludes me. What is it at Waterloo or Southwark stations that justifies the Extra Extra Large tag?

A tip of the hat goes to Jonathan Raper for spotting this in Adam Lilley's Tweet-stream.

Map Nature Or Map Nurture; Are Map Addicts Born Or Made?

Work+ - A Fantastic Idea For A Location Based App; Shame About The Metadata Though

mistaking the context (location) for the end game and that location is (also) a key context, but most people don't know this. Two years or so after I wrote those posts, the concept of location based mobile services and location based apps shows no sign of dying off. I see lots of new location based apps and whilst they're almost always nice and glossy, not that many of them really grab you as a neat and innovative idea. But every so often, one does come along which makes you slap your forehead, like the scientists in the 80's ads for Tefal, and mutter under your breath ... that's so obvious, why didn't I think of that?

I once wrote two posts saying that people are mistaking the context (location) for the end game and that location is (also) a key context, but most people don't know this. Two years or so after I wrote those posts, the concept of location based mobile services and location based apps shows no sign of dying off. I see lots of new location based apps and whilst they're almost always nice and glossy, not that many of them really grab you as a neat and innovative idea. But every so often, one does come along which makes you slap your forehead, like the scientists in the 80's ads for Tefal, and mutter under your breath ... that's so obvious, why didn't I think of that?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWWbUd2CGCM&rel=0]

These days I tend to work as much out of the office than I do in the office. My needs for this are relatively few; somewhere to plug my laptop in, free wifi and a half-way decent cup of espresso now and again. Using local location based search services I can find places near me that meet these needs but it's a disjointed experience, using multiple apps to find free wifi, good espresso and so on. Maybe the recently launched Work+ can help me out here?

First impressions are good. I launch the app and connect it to my Foursquare account (the check-in feature within Work+ is a nice touch). Work+ also passes the first hurdle than many location based apps fail at; it actually works outside of the United States.

I install the app, tap on Work and then Go to launch the easy to use search interface. I need wifi ... tap. I need a table to put my laptop on ... tap. I need coffee ... tap.

Ideally I'd also like to see a search setting that says "by coffee I mean decent espresso and no, I don't mean Starbucks" but maybe I'm being overly picky here.

So I tap on Search and I get a list of places that are close by to me that meet my needs or I can view those places on (Apple's new) map. This is great. What is there not to like?

But wait, do all of these places actually meet my needs? The search results seem good, there's no duplicates or places that either don't exist or have since closed; problems which can plague location based services and which are by no means simple to solve. The results are also pretty close to where I am. But ...

  • The two hits for Costa Coffee are pretty good; as the name implies they both sell (reasonably passable) coffee and have (free-ish but time limited) wifi. Score, 2/7.
  • The same goes for Caffe Nero, another one of the big UK coffee chains. Score, 3/7.
  • Caffe Toscana is my local neighbourhood cafe. Great food and coffee ... but no wifi, at least not when I visited last week. Score, 3/7
  • Astrora Coffee isn't a cafe. They sell coffee in the raw, roasted beans and ground beans. No wifi and not really somewhere you can work; I'd imagine the staff getting somewhat bemused if someone turned up and tried to work there. Score, still 3/7.
  • Diner's Delight is as the name suggests, a local diner. No wifi here either. Score, 3/7 again.
  • Finally, The Nearest Cafe is a cafe and they do sell pretty good coffee. But again, no wifi here.

The final score ends up as 3 hits that really meet my needs, out of a possible 7.

It would be easy to take what I've just written as an indictment of Work+ but nothing could be further from the truth. Local search is not an easy thing to do. Tightly focused local search across a wide range of attributes that you can assign to a place (wifi, coffee and so on) is insanely difficult to do. It's true that Work+ doesn't score as highly as I'd have hoped in what is admittedly a very subjective search on a very limited local area. But Work+ shows the direction that local search is headed in. It's no longer enough to ask find me what's around me, we need to be able to ask find me what's around me that fits what I need to know now and more importantly get good answers to that question.

What makes the Work+ experience not quite as good as it could be isn't down to the app, which makes local search a pain free and simple process. What lets Work+ down is the lack of a complete local data set which contains not just the accepted standard place attributes of name, address, location and category but also which adds in more detailed, almost ambient or fuzzy, attributes, such as wifi, capacity (can I fit a large group of people in here?), beverage types (coffee or tea?), noise level and ambience.

Make no mistake, Work+ is a precursor to the local search and location based experiences we can expect to see in the very near future; whether the back-end data with all of the rich attributes that people want to search on will keep up with demand remains to be seen.

What Do You Call The Opposite Of Mapping?

Map Wars; Are Apple's Maps Really That Bad?

The Map Of The World According To The London Underground

World Metro Map by Mark Ovenden

Photo Credits: Annie Mole on Flickr.

Yes, it's another map. Yes, it's another map of the London Tube system. But wait ... something's not quite right.

Surely the Piccadilly Line ends at Uxbridge, Heathrow Airport and Cockfosters and not at Seattle, Buenos Aires and St. Petersburg? Doesn't the Northern Line run from Edgeware and High Barnet to Morden and not from Helsinki to Mumbai?

Maybe if the London Underground did take over the world, including 3 tunnels across the Atlantic Ocean, this is what the Tube Map might look like.

World Metro Map by Mark Ovenden

Photo Credits: Annie Mole on Flickr.

Maps, Maps And MOAR Maps At The Society Of Cartographers And Expedia

Commission on Neocartography. Cartography, neocartography, maps; what is there not to like? I'd previously spoken at the UK's Society of Cartographer's annual conference so it was great to be asked by Steve Chilton, SoC and Neocartography chair, to speak at the Neocartography Commission.

Updated September 13th. 2012 with embedded YouTube video.

Wednesday September 5th. 2012 was a day of maps. To be precise, it was a day of maps, maps and MOAR maps. Two events, two talks, back to back. Packed choc-a-bloc full of maps. I also cheated slightly.

Firstly there was the International Cartographical Association's first session of the newly formed Commission on Neocartography. Cartography, neocartography, maps; what is there not to like? I'd previously spoken at the UK's Society of Cartographer's annual conference so it was great to be asked by Steve Chilton, SoC and Neocartography chair, to speak at the Neocartography Commission.

For a change, the talk title and abstract I gave Steve didn't vary during the usual researching and writing of the talk.

`Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v1278) Subject: Re: Neocartography workshop X-Universally-Unique-Identifier: d1c70302-eaba-4132-80fb-f74eb1de2347 From: Gary Gale In-Reply-To: DEC2FCE18B20734CAFA668E438482963834F621862@WGFP-EXMBV1.uni.mdx.ac.uk Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 14:13:39 +0100 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Smtp-Server: mail.vicchi.org:redacted Message-Id: BEB576E2-3E8C-4136-803A-0CE5E5456C26@vicchi.org To: Steve Chilton

Actually, I'm going to change the title ... what I'd really like to see up on the web site is this ...

Title: History Repeats Itself And So Does The Map Abstract: Steve Chilton says this just MIGHT be interesting; you'll have to take his word for this

... but that might not work. So try this for size instead

Title: History Repeats Itself And So Does The Map Abstract: History has a habit of repeating itself and so does the map. From primitive scratchings, through ever more sumptuous pieces of art, through to authoritative geographical representations, the map changes throughout history. Maps speak of the hopes, dreams and prejudices of their creators and audience alike, and with the advent of neogeography and neocartography, maps are again as much art as they are geographical information.

... will that do?

G`

But then, no sooner had I got one event for that Wednesday when fellow Yahoo! alumni and now Expedia developer and chief evangelist Steve Marshall asked me to team up with ex-Doppleran and ex-Nokian Matt Biddulph at Expedia's EAN World of Data event which was cunningly masquerading as a BBQ that very Wednesday evening. So I cheated. One day. Loads of maps. Two events. But one talk. Only time will tell whether I got away with it or not.

Rob de Feo: Natural Language Processing & Gary Gale: Maps @ EAN Developer Network

My talk at the Neocartography workshop was filmed and you can watch it below, if you like that sort of thing. Personally I hate seeing myself on video, it's even more excrutiating than hearing myself on audio.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSRWy9kMf00]

As usual, the slide deck, plus notes are embedded below, also if you like that sort of thing.

[scribd id=105081787 key=key-28dj39ezex1j55yczevw mode=scroll]

Slide 3

So, hello, I’m Gary and I'm from the internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Places for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide 4

Most of my talk have a lot of links in them and sometimes I see people rushing to take a note of them if they see something they think is interesting. You might want to do this too, but don't ...

Slide 5

... this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. It's nice and short and easy to scrawl down. Although if you go there right now, it'll just take you to the home page of my blog, but sometime tomorrow or the day after this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear.

https://vtny.org/kk Slide 6

It's also fair to say that this talk is something approaching a personal first. When I'm asked to give a talk, I'm usually asked for a title and an abstract some 3 or so months before the talk. That's also a long time before I actually start writing the talk.

Slide 7 / Slide 8

... but this time, not only has the talk title stayed the same, the abstract still fits and it's even the talk I set out to write, and I have the email to prove it.

Slide 9

But enough about me. Let's set some context. We live in a connected world of interwebs and mobiles. Some of you probably know of this thing on the interwebs called Twitter which has hashtags to identify common themes. A popular hashtag is for people who like to take photos of their food. They use the hashtag #foodporn.

Slide 10

Well I take photos of maps and there's lots of maps in this talk. You could say it's pure unadulterated #mapporn and I make no apology for it.

Slide 11

But before I talk about today's maps, I want to set a little historical context.

Slide 12

This is one of the earliest maps we know of, of the world as the Babylonians thought of it. Babylon is in the centre of the map and there's seven triangular islands, 3 of which are missing due to damage, in the "river of bitter water", or the sea. To me, the Babylon map is both art, hope and inspiration for the unmapped areas of their world and the best attempt of the age to be authoritative.

Slide 13

Fast forward several centuries to the "golden age of exploration" and while maps are more recognisably accurate, they're still art. But this art came at a price. You needed to be wealthy to commission such a map and such a map was often given as a notional gift to the rich and powerful to curry favour.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/2675672726/ Slide 14

Furthermore maps were state secrets; sharing maps was sharing power and influence. The entrepreneurs of the time were the great navigators like Columbus and Magellan, their sponsors were kings and countries; their business plan were maps.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/5385389984/ Slide 15

But maps don't just have to be geographically accurate. They can show data as well. This 1869 map by Charles Minard shows the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in his 1812 Russian campaign. Beginning at the Polish/Russian border on the left, the thick pinkish band shows the size of the army as they advanced towards Moscow. The thinner black band shows the ever decreasing size of the remains of the army as they retreated in the bitterly cold winter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png Slide 16

Another type of not necessarily geographically accurate map are the familiar mass transit and metro maps that you probably all recognise, all descended in some shape or form from Harry Beck's iconic map of London's Tube system.

Slide 17

And then, there's the map that most people of my generation will find immediately familiar, the Ordnance Survey map, from the printed version of the pink LandRanger series of maps through to the online version still found at certain zoom levels on streetmap.co.uk.

Slide 18

And no far too quick resume of maps would be complete without the maps we use on an almost daily basis, from Nokia ...

Slide 19

... from Google

Slide 20

... from Bing

Slide 21

... and from OpenStreetMap. All of these are pretty much authoritative, geographically accurate and cartographically pleasing to the eye. But from the maps of 16th and 17th centuries to today's web and mobile maps, there's something missing. There's some brilliant cartography at work but the art seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way. Or has it?

Slide 22

This map of where I live, using the Watercolor style from San Francisco based Stamen, is as geographically accurate and authoritative as the maps from Nokia, Google and others, but to my mind this is most definitely art. It also happens to be my second favourite map.

Slide 23

So how did we get here ...

Slide 24

... how did we get from cuneiform impressions on a baked mud tablet ...

Slide 25

... to a watercolour style map that, if allowed, I'd want to hang on my wall in a large as possible size as I could get.

Slide 26

I think the answer is data. Lots of data. Easily accessible data, either in bulk or through an API, either free and open or licensed and proprietary. We now have access to the raw spatial data that was previously the preserve of the professional cartographer alone. People can start to make their own maps, their personal, subjective, art maps in ways never previously possible and they can do this because they want to and just because they can.

Slide 27

We can make maps, not only of what is and of what was but also of what might have been but which never came to pass, such as this map of what Berlin would have looked like if Albert Speer's plan for the city had been realised and if the events of 1945 had been very different from what is in our history books.

https://mypantsareonfire.tumblr.com/post/30302438119/albert-speers-new-berlin Slide 28

There's also a flip side to all of this though. Just because we can make maps from all of this wonderful data we now have doesn't always mean we should make maps, such as this gem from the Ottawa Sun which manages to put Saudi Arabia in Africa, puts Iran on the Arabian Peninsula where Saudi Arabia should be, overlooks the fact that the Sudan is now two countries and gets Malaysia and Indonesia confused.

https://ottawa.openfile.ca/blog/ottawa/2012/suns-same-sex-marriage-map-puts-saudi-arabia-africa-among-other-cringeworthy-errors Slide 29

But the topic of bad maps is another talk entirely, so let's get back to good maps. With access to the underlying spatial data and to other data sets with a spatial element, we can now make maps which provide insights into mapping the unmappable. Some cities have formally defined neighbourhoods, London doesn't. But Tom Taylor's Boundaries took a spatially correct map and mashed up Flickr's Alpha data set to show not where London's neighbourhoods are, but where people think the neighbourhoods are. Which may not be 100% accurate but it's a darn sight better to have a notion of where London's neighbourhoods are than no notion at all.

https://boundaries.tomtaylor.co.uk Slide 30

Then there's this map. Definitely one to be filed under the category of "maps because we can", at first sight this map just looks like the US, with lines joining up the notional centroids of each State. Until you start to play with it in a web browser

Slide 31

And all of a sudden you can start to see what would happen if you decided you really didn't want California, Florida or Texas to be where they currently reside. You can play with this for hours. I did. When I really should have been finishing this talk.

https://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111018/force-states.html Slide 32

The more data sets that people produce, the more people can and will make maps with them, so if you'd ever had a yearning to see where people have discovered fossils, for example, then there's a map to show you that. You can argue that this is nothing more than a classic Web 2.0 style maps mashup, but give people a spatial data set and they'll make a map out of it and sometimes that's good enough

https://earth-base.org/fossils Slide 33

But sometimes people will go several steps beyond a maps mash up and produce something which is only just recognisable as a map and is much more about the data visualisation. Like plumegraph.

https://plumegraph.org Slide 34

Here, the map is relegated to a small piece of digital canvas on which the data is projected. But it's still a map, it's still accurate and even if the data being visualised is part of humanity's less attractive side, it's still visually gorgeous. It's still a map.

Slide 35

Now people sometimes make the mistake of assuming that all of this data we're making maps out of is a relatively recent thing. But long before we had the convenient label of "Big Data", organisations such as the NOAA were creating data sets you could make maps out of, we just didn't make the maps until now. So now, we can have temporal as well as spatial maps, such as the tracks of US tornados over the last 56 or so years ...

https://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2012/05/tornado-tracks.html Slide 36

... or hurricanes over the last 160 or so years. This map is a particular favourite of mine as it subverts the usual mercator projection we tend to see on maps and instead takes a bottom up approach, with Antartica as the focal point, so we can see how these great storms circle around our planet.

https://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2012/08/hurricanes-since-1851.html Slide 37

Staying with the theme of wind for a moment. This map shows the realtime wind patterns over the United States. Or at least what the wind patterns were on August 31st, when I took this screen shot. It's a nice classic example of a data map. A visualisation of wind patterns. A key of wind speeds. Nothing particularly special. Until you see the realtime aspect ...

https://hint.fm/wind/ Slide 38

... and suddenly the map comes alive. It moves and almost breathes. As with a lot of today's map visualisations, it's oddly compelling and draws you in.

Slide 39

And now, to coin a Monty Python phrase, for something completely different. We're used to seeing maps in Geradus Mercator's map projections. The first maps we see, often at school, or in an atlas at home, tend to be in this projection. It's easy to forget that this is how maps have been projected since 1569. But if you've seen any of the stunning NASA images of our planet as seen from space, you'll probably have noticed that a Mercator map doesn't look like our planet does from space. The map is distorted to fit the projection. Antarctica is this long white smear along the bottom of the map. Greenland is around 60% bigger than it really is.

There's other map projections. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map is one of my favourites. It makes a bit more sense if you rotate it through 90 degrees.

https://www.bfi.org/about-bucky/buckys-big-ideas/dymaxion-world/dymaxion-map Slide 40

There's no projection distortion. It shows our planet almost as a single island in a massive ocean. There's no splitting of the continents. As Buckminster Fuller put it "the maps we use still cause humanity to appear inherently disassociated, remote, self-interestedly preoccupied with the political concept of its got to be you or me; there is not enough for both".

https://www.westnet.com/~crywalt/unfold.html Slide 41

There's just one more map to go but before I get there, I wanted to look a little bit ahead to where maps might go if you could interact with them with more than just a finger on a touch screen or a mouse or trackpad on a laptop.

What about putting a boarding pass on a map and it would show you where in the airport your gate is. What about putting a mobile phone on the map and it would show you where you could charge it. What if you could put a credit card on a map and it would show you where a bureau de change or an ATM is? MIT's Media Lab have done just this with TaPuMa, the Tangible Public Map. Maybe this is the next generation of intelligent, interactive maps?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bz9shk8UU Slide 42

So this is the part of a talk where it's traditional to start to wrap things up and to maybe pontificate where we go from here, or what's going to be happening in a year or so's time.

Sadly, I can't do that. As more and more data becomes available, more and more people are making maps from that data in ways we can't even think of right now. All I can say is that making maps is becoming more and more democratised and while we'll always need formal and authoritative maps, we also have the ability to make our own maps and that ability is becoming easier and easier with each passing month.

Slide 43

And as an example of this democratisation of the map in action, I'll leave you with my personal favourite map, again from Stamen, called Pretty Maps, which seems to be an excellent name as this is definitely a map and it's definitely pretty. Will this be my favourite map in a year's time ... only time, maps and data will tell.

Slide 44

I hope you've enjoyed seeing these maps, as much as I've enjoyed researching them. Thanks for listening.

Photo Credits: Eva-Lotta Lamm on Flickr.

A Map Of The World In One Million Lego Bricks

A 1 Million Piece Lego Map Of The World.

Oddly enough, that's exactly what members of the public did on London's Southbank during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Looking From San Francisco To London. In Lego.

If you want to see it for yourself, head over to the terraces outside the Royal Festival Hall but you'll have to hurry. The map will only be around until August 26th.

Imagine for one moment that someone gave you in excess of a million lego bricks and four thousand lego building plates. Imagine also that you had around three week's worth of spare time.

What would you build?

To my mind, the first thing that should spring to mind is a massive map of the world. You've got enough bricks so making a map around 12 by 5 meters should do the trick.

A 1 Million Piece Lego Map Of The World.

Oddly enough, that's exactly what members of the public did on London's Southbank during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Looking From San Francisco To London. In Lego.

If you want to see it for yourself, head over to the terraces outside the Royal Festival Hall but you'll have to hurry. The map will only be around until August 26th.

When The Olympics Left Teddington

the end of the road in the part of London where I live.

And then the Games finished, but they left something behind. A Teddington Olympic legacy if you will.

Definitely to be filed under local interest only, but a few week's back the 2012 Olympic Games came to London. Part of the Games came to the part of London where I live. Actually part of the games came to the end of the road in the part of London where I live.

And then the Games finished, but they left something behind. A Teddington Olympic legacy if you will.

Look out for our painters in Teddington tomorrow. @mo_farah will have a 2nd #GoldPostBox appearing there in the morning!

— Royal Mail News (@royalmailnews) August 11, 2012

It turned out that Mo Farah, only the seventh man in history to win the 5,000 and 10,000 meter races in the same Olympic Games, used to work at Sweatshop, a local business in Teddington founded by British athlete and founder of the London Marathon, Chris Brasher. In honour of Mo's success, his management company sponsored the Royal Mail to paint a postbox gold. This is not the first of Mo's Golden Postboxes, the first is over in Isleworth, but it's certainly proved popular with the local population and makes a lasting, though for how long no-one knows, legacy of when the Olympics came to and left Teddington.

Normal maps and geo related postings will resume soon.

Foursquare Checkins, Maps And WordPress; Now With MOAR Maps

WP Quadratum plugin. Foursquare, checkins and maps ... what more could you ask for? Maybe the answer is more maps.

Version 1.1 of the WP Quadratum plugin, which went live this morning, now has added maps. The previous versions of the plugin used Nokia's maps, because I work for Nokia's Location & Commerce group and I wanted to use the maps that I work on. But if Nokia's maps aren't the maps for you then how about Google's, or maybe CloudMade's OpenStreetMap maps or perhaps OpenLayers' OpenStreetMap maps.

If you're an avid Foursquare user you can already display your last checkin, visualised on a map, in the sidebar of your WordPress powered site with the WP Quadratum plugin. Foursquare, checkins and maps ... what more could you ask for? Maybe the answer is more maps.

Version 1.1 of the WP Quadratum plugin, which went live this morning, now has added maps. The previous versions of the plugin used Nokia's maps, because I work for Nokia's Location & Commerce group and I wanted to use the maps that I work on. But if Nokia's maps aren't the maps for you then how about Google's, or maybe CloudMade's OpenStreetMap maps or perhaps OpenLayers' OpenStreetMap maps.

Thanks to the Mapstraction JavaScript mapping API, WP Quadratum now allows you to choose which mapping provider you'd like to see your checkins appear on. And if you don't want a map on the sidebar of your site, you can embed the checkin map in any post or page with the plugin's shortcode too.

As usual, the plugin is free to download and use, either from the official WordPress plugin repository or from GitHub.

As a fully paid up and self confessed map geek I may be somewhat biased but surely most things can be improved with the simple addition of more maps.

When The Olympics Came To Teddington

But also yes, the opening ceremony was amazing. And yes, my home town in the suburbs of London is slap bang in the middle of the cycling road race events.

Generic Photo Shot

And yes, when the Olympics came to Teddington, right to the end of the road where I live, it was utterly and truly amazing. For once, the overused cliche of "once in a lifetime experience" seems utterly apt.

Yes, it was difficult if not impossible to get tickets. Yes, it's overly political. Yes, LOCOG has been overly aggressive in protecting its idea of what the Olympic brand is and in supposedly protecting the interests of the sponsors. Yes, it absolutely sucks that you can only use a Visa card to pay for anything Olympic related.

But also yes, the opening ceremony was amazing. And yes, my home town in the suburbs of London is slap bang in the middle of the cycling road race events.

Generic Photo Shot

And yes, when the Olympics came to Teddington, right to the end of the road where I live, it was utterly and truly amazing. For once, the overused cliche of "once in a lifetime experience" seems utterly apt.

Where You Are Isn't That Interesting But Where You Will Be Is

Big Brother" and "company X is tracking me" as well. But lost in the rhetoric and hyperbole around this subject is a well hidden fact ... your current location isn't actually that interesting to anyone apart from yourself.

For most of the day we tend to be on the move so even if a service does know your location that fact becomes irrelevant almost immediately. Intrusive location based advertising is normally held up for inspection here but without context a location is just a set of longitude and latitude coordinates, coordinates that are out of date and no longer relevant almost as soon as they've been detected.

Maybe a location based service I use does want to target me with location based ads, but for example, if I'm on my irregular commute from the suburbs to the centre of London on a train, I challenge anyone to find an ad, intrusive or not, that would be contextually relevant to me in sufficient detail that would warrant an advertiser paying out the not insignificant sums that such ad campaigns cost. Unless maybe, just maybe, it's an ad that offers me a viable alternative to SouthWestTrain's execrable and expensive train service, but that's just in the realms of fantasy.

Every once in a while the thorny topic of location privacy rears its ugly head, often in tandem with a new location based service or the discovery of what an existing one is really doing. There's often cries of "Big Brother" and "company X is tracking me" as well. But lost in the rhetoric and hyperbole around this subject is a well hidden fact ... your current location isn't actually that interesting to anyone apart from yourself.

For most of the day we tend to be on the move so even if a service does know your location that fact becomes irrelevant almost immediately. Intrusive location based advertising is normally held up for inspection here but without context a location is just a set of longitude and latitude coordinates, coordinates that are out of date and no longer relevant almost as soon as they've been detected.

Maybe a location based service I use does want to target me with location based ads, but for example, if I'm on my irregular commute from the suburbs to the centre of London on a train, I challenge anyone to find an ad, intrusive or not, that would be contextually relevant to me in sufficient detail that would warrant an advertiser paying out the not insignificant sums that such ad campaigns cost. Unless maybe, just maybe, it's an ad that offers me a viable alternative to SouthWestTrain's execrable and expensive train service, but that's just in the realms of fantasy.

You are here.

Now it's true that if you gather enough data points you can start to infer some meaning from the resultant data set. You can probably determine the rough area where someone works and where they live based on their location at certain times of the day. But in today's connected world of the interwebs, with their social networks and uploaded photographs, that level of locational granularity can be inferred fairly easily without the need to explicitly track the location of an individual.

All of the above can be summed up as something like ...

Where you are right now isn't that interesting. Where you were is slightly more interesting. Where you will be is very interesting.

I'm sure I've said words to this effect before in a talk at a conference but try as I might I can't find a reference to back up this assertion.

What's even more interesting is that a recent research study at the UK's University of Birmingham took 200 volunteers who agreed to have their phones track them, added in the locations of their friends in their social graphs and produced an algorithm that was able to predict where a participant would be in 24 hours time, sometimes with accuracies of less than 20 meters and with an average accuracy of around 1000 meters. The full research paper makes for fascinating reading and shows that the real key to location technologies may not be where you currently are but may be much more about our predicability and daily routines for ourselves and our friends.

Now that's interesting.

Photo Credits: misspixels on Flickr.

Of CSS, Pointers, Archive Pages and Meta Boxes; WP Biographia Reaches v3.2

WP Biographia v3.2 got pushed to the WordPress plugin repository this afternoon. In the grand scheme of things it's not a massive release but it goes a long way to solving some of the most frequently asked questions that arrive in my Inbox and via the plugin's support forums.

As I've mentioned a few times in the past, it's nigh on impossible to test a WordPress plugin against the myriad combinations of themes and plugins that exist in the WordPress ecosystem. Especially where CSS is concerned, plugins and themes frequently don't play well together and bleed over from another theme or plugin's CSS often makes WP Biographia's formatting look ... interesting. This tends to happen in two places. Firstly in the formatting of the contact links in the Biography Box and secondly in the positioning of the user's avatar image.

Wp Biographia v3.2 provides two workarounds for this. The plugin's CSS now uses the !important CSS specifier to ensure the CSS is applied as it should be in as many cases as is possible.

But sometimes this isn't enough to fix formatting issues, especially if the plugin's the_content filter priority has been dropped below the default value of 10, to get the Biography Box to appear in the right order with the output of other plugins. In this case, the WordPress wpautop filter, which automagically adds paragraph tags, runs after the Biography Box is produced. In this situation you can now tell the plugin to synchronise the wpautop filter to run after the Biography Box is produced.

WordPress v3.3 added support for Pointers; helpful little pop-ups in the WordPress admin screens that display useful information. WP Biographia now supports these and when you install or upgrade you'll see a what's new popup, plus a guided tour of the plugin's settings tabs.

Another frequently requested feature was the ability to break down the display of the Biography Box on archive pages from an all or nothing basis to one where you can select which one of the author, category, date or tag archives you want the Biography Box to appear on. WP Biographia v3.2 now supports this ability.

The full list of new features and bug fixes for v3.2 looks something like this.

  • Added: Support for synchronising the use of wpautop via the the_content and the_excerpt filters to ensure these filters fire before the Biography Box is produced when the plugin's filter priority is less than the default filter priority to avoid formatting issues for contact links.
  • Added: Support for WordPress Pointers to display "what's new" information post install or upgrade and to provide a "guided tour" of the plugin's settings and options.
  • Added: Support for displaying the Biography Box as a widget.
  • Added: Support for a shorter biography to the user's profile to be used in conjunction with the Biography Box widget.
  • Added: Support to display the Biography Box for all types of archive page; author, category, date and tag.
  • Added: Custom meta boxes to the post/page/custom-post creation/editing screens to hide the Biography Box, making it easier to define the Admin screen's Exclusion settings.
  • Added: Support for the shortcode's user attribute; deprecating support for the author attribute.
  • Added: Increased the width of text and select boxes for the Admin and Exclusion admin tabs to allow for longer category names and longer lists of post IDs to be displayed.
  • Added: Wrap the plugin's avatars (if present) in plugin specific CSS code to prevent theme specific CSS bleeding into the Biography Box.
  • Fixed: The layout of the Biography Box for feeds now ignore displaying contact links as icons and formats them as plain text.
  • Fixed: Example use of the wp_biographia_feed filter in readme.txt.
  • Fixed: Bug where the wp_biographia_feed filter was never called in the context of a feed.
  • Fixed: Formatting of HTML for the Biography Box post/page hiding options in the user's profile.
  • Fixed: Use the term "hide" consistently across the plugin and documentation; previous versions used "hide" and "suppress" interchangeably.
  • Fixed: Use the term "user" consistently across the plugin and documentation; previous versions used "author" and "user" interchangeably.
  • Fixed: Bug where the last page of a multiply paged post was not correctly detected, resulting in the Biography Box being displayed for all pages.

So where does WP Biographia go from here? That's a very good question. Unless there's a major feature which the plugin doesn't support and which no-one has (yet) asked for I think the plugin will stay pretty much as is for the foreseeable future. For now, the plugin is relatively flexible and fast and I want it to stay that way. Unless you know better. In which case, let me know in the comments.

Don't Go There, Go Here; A WordPress Redirection Plugin

Despite having written 5 plugins for WordPress I've only just scratched the surface of what it's possible to make WordPress do. So when I want to make WordPress do something that I'm not sure a) how to do and b) whether it's even possible or not, I turn to a search engine. More often than not I get an answer. Often that answer seems to start along the lines of

put the following code in your theme's functions.php file

It's not that this is wrong but I have a slight issue with hacking a theme's functions.php file, for a number of reasons. Firstly this is theme specific; change your theme and your modifications still exist, they're just in your old theme and you'll need to remember to copy and paste them over to the new theme. Secondly, any file which is part of a theme can, and probably will, be overwritten on a theme update and unless you've saved a copy of your changes to functions.php, you can wave them goodbye.

So whenever I see the magic phrase put the following code in your theme's functions.php file, nine times out of ten I mentally read this as this should really live in a plugin.

Which is exactly what happened when I wanted to set up a redirection so that anyone hitting the URL of a certain post on my blog would be automagically redirected to another URL. The most common solution to this was to set up a custom field, called something like redirect and then hook into template_redirect, check for the custom field in the post metadata and then fire off an HTTP 301 redirect via wp_redirect. Where should I do this? In my theme's functions.php of course. I naturally read this as this should be in a plugin. A quick search through the WordPress plugin repository revealed that there were plugins that sort of did this, but none of them did precisely what I wanted.

Thus was WP Avertere born. It was originally going to be called WP Redirect but that plugin name was already taken and so, in line with some of my other WordPress plugins, WP Biographia and WP Quadratum, WP Avertere, named from the latin for "divert" came into being.

The plugin does all of the above custom field mangling, template_redirect hooking and wp_redirect redirecting that I could have done in functions.php. But it does this ... cleaner.

The plugin adds a custom meta box to the Admin Edit screen for posts, for pages and for any custom post type. It allows you to check your redirection URL for well formed-ness. It allows you to set up temporary and permanent redirections. It hooks into the page_link and post_link hooks so that whenever you see a permalink to the old URL it'll read as a permalink to the new, redirected URL. And most importantly of all, it allows you to cancel an existing redirection for those times when you decide you don't want a URL to be redirected after all.

As with all the WordPress plugins I've written, and this is plugin number 6, the code is up for forking and hacking around on GitHub. It'll also be on the WordPress Plugin Repository once I've published this post and submitted the plugin to the benevolent WordPress plugin overlords. Until then, you can download the plugin's source in one convenient archive right here, as GitHub's downloads don't, for some reason, include Git submodules.

But one final caveat. What happens if the original post or page that you want to redirect has comments? With this first version of the plugin the comments will still be there but you won't be able to see them as the redirect will automagically push you to the new, redirected, URL. I'm well aware that this is a shortcoming and the next version of the plugin will support the ability to copy the comments from the source post to the new, redirected, post.

Big (Location) Data vs. My (Location) Data

For a pleasant change, the guts of this talk didn't metamorphose oddly during the writing. Instead, it geolocated. This was originally planned to be my keynote talk at Social-Loco in San Francisco last month. But I wasn't able to make it to the Bay Area as planned for reasons too complex to go into here. Suffice to say, the slide deck languished unloved on my laptops hard drive, taking up 30 odd MB of storage and not really going anywhere.

Then I got an email from Stuart Mitchell at Geodigital asking me if I'd like to talk at the AGI's Northern Conference and thus, after a brief bit of editing to remove the conspicuous Silicon Valley references, this talk relocated from San Francisco to Manchester. As per usual, the slide deck plus notes are below.

[scribd id=100297709 key=key-15vmdecagp3xopiyihgt mode=list]

Slide 2

So, hello, I’m Gary. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Places for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide 3

There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it'll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear on my blog.

https://vtny.org/jT Slide 4

One of the things I love about writing a talk for a conference is how the things I hear and the things I read get mentally stored away and then, somehow, they start to draw together to form a semi-coherent narrative around the talk title that I inevitably gave to the conference organisers around 3 months prior. So it is with this talk, which in Sesame Street fashion, has been unknowingly brought to you by ...

Slide 5

Kellan Elliott-McCrea, previously at Flickr and Yahoo! and now at Etsy ...

Slide 6

Aaron Straup Cope, previously at Flickr and Stamen Design and now doing stuff at the Smithsonian ...

Slide 7

... and my children. No, really. This isn't just an excuse to put a photo of my family up on the screen behind me so you can all, hopefully, go "awww".

Slide 8

But before I get into anything to do with location data, big data, my data or anything interweb or social network related I want to try and frame the context of my thoughts by talking about communication, or to be more precise, the way in which we communicate. We are, politics and warfare aside, a social species and communicating with each other is something we do a lot of, although the manner in which we communicate has changed a lot.

A lot of our communication is both verbal and non-verbal and relies of face to face, person to person, proximity so that the verbal and non verbal approach comes together to express what we intend to say.

Slide 9

Some of our communication is written, the old fashioned way, using pen and paper, although a lot of commentators have called out the "death of the letter". Whether that's true or just good headline making hyperbole remains to be seen, but to be fair, I can't remember the last time I actually sat down and wrote a letter.

Slide 10

A lot of our communication is still verbal but via a phone, be that a land line or a mobile. We call and we text. A lot.

Slide 11

But be it talking face to face, texting someone or even writing an email, the intended audience is still narrow, person to person, or person to small audience.

But the interwebs have added to this sphere of communications and now we broadcast our thoughts, feelings and experiences, sometimes regardless of whether we think anyone will see this, let alone empathise or communicate back. A lot of this broadcasting has a location context, be it explicit via a geotag or implicit through mentions of a place or some other geographical construct.

Slide 12

While we still talk, meet, engage and sometimes broadcast, like I'm doing right now, this human-to-human interaction has been augmented, maybe complimented by electronic communications.

Slide 13

We're as likely to post a Tweet on Twitter or a status on Facebook or Google+ or another social network as we are to speak face to face.

Slide 14

And because this type of communiqué is electronic, that means it generates data as we go. Today we generate lots of data, big data, on a daily basis. It's probably not unfair to say that there's data being generated in this very auditorium, right now, as I'm saying this.

Slide 15

Some of this data is implicit. A by-product of what we're doing. Whether it's our cell phones loosely mapping out where we are, not a privacy invasion I hasten to add, but the simple way in which cellular networks work, but that's a topic for another talk on another day, or our GPS navigation, be it built into our car or our smartphone, providing anonymised traffic data probes to show where freeway congestion is, we don't consciously set out to generate this data. It's a by product of what we're doing.

Slide 16

But a lot of this data is very much explicit. We type out a status update on our phone, our tablet, our laptop and we tap or click on the button that says "go" or "submit" or we take a photo, maybe add an image filter or a comment and tap or click the button that says "share" or "upload".

Slide 17

By doing this we're explicitly communicating, explicitly broadcasting and sharing with our friend, family, followers and the interwebs in general ... and in doing so, we're playing our part in generating more and more data.

Slide 18

And generate it we do. Lots of it. We call it big data, but massive data would be a more accurate definition of it. Whilst our own individual contributions to big data may not be that big, when you put it all together it's part of an ever growing corpus of big data and there's companies that both provide the means for us to broadcast and share this data as well as, hopefully, providing a means of revenue for them to enable them to keep doing this. The amounts that get generated each day is almost too much for us to think about and comprehend. Once a number gets that big, we can't really deal with it. We know it's a big number but what that actually represents is hard for us to get our head around.

Slide 19

So let's look at just a small sample of what gets generated on a daily basis from the social big data, communicating, sharing and broadcasting services I tend to use, if not on a daily basis then at least on a weekly basis. I Tweet and update my Facebook status at least once a day, sometimes up to 20 times a day. I check-in to places on Foursquare at least 10 times a day and take and upload photos to Instagram and Facebook around 3 times a week. That's just my contribution, think how many people are doing the same thing to get to the sort of volumes you can see on the slide behind me.

Slide 20

But how long will this continue? Remember the people I spoke about right at the start of this talk, some 16 slides back? It's time to bring them into the picture. Firstly, my children, although this applies equally to pretty much all children. Remember when you were a child? The summer vacation was endless. The skies were always blue and the sun was always out (remember, I'm from the UK where Summer and sun do not always go together, in fact it was pouring down with rain as I wrote this at home last week). And just like the summer vacation was endless, so were your parents and the people around you, they were eternal and would always be there. Remember feeling like that? But then the inevitable happened. We grew up and we discovered, often the hard way, that the summer wasn't endless and that almost everything is finite.

Slide 21

Social networks and social location networks aren't finite either. They get born, if they're lucky they grow and then at some time or other they ... stop. If it's a social network you don't use then it doesn't really bother us much.

Slide 22

But if it's a network you've shared a lot of content through, what happens then? A lot of people, myself included, immediately get into "I want my data back" mode.

Slide 23

But is it your data. Of course it is. You made it. You composed that Tweet. You shared that link. You took that photo. You were at that place you check-in at. Of course it's your data.

But there's a point to be made here. You may have created that data, you may own that data, but the copy of that data in that social network is just that. It's a copy. It's not necessarily "your" data and because most of us don't preserve what we send up into the cloud on its way to our social networks, you may have created it, but the copy in the cloud isn't necessarily yours.

Slide 24

It's an easy mistake to make. I may be a geo-technologist and many more things besides, but I am not a lawyer, and apart from the lawyers in the room, more of you aren't and most of the people who use social networks aren't lawyers either, unless it's DeferoLaw, which is a social network for the legal profession.

Slide 25

We see phrases such as “you retain your rights” …

Slide 26

... like "you own the content posted" ...

Slide 27

... and "you always own your information" and immediately the subtleties and complexities of data ownership, licensing, copyright and intellectual property are cast aside. We say to ourselves, "it's my data dammit, I own it, I want it".

Slide 28

And it's this belief that we really are lawyers in our spare time that makes people think that somehow the data they've shared via a social network is physically theirs, rather than a bit for bit perfect copy that we've licensed to that social network. We forget for a moment that we're using that social network as a cloud based backup, in some cases the only backup, of our creations and we mutter darkly about "holding my data hostage".

Slide 29

The blunt, and often harsh reality, is the age old adage that "you get what you pay for". If you pay, you're probably a customer. If you're using something for "free" (and I say free in very large italics and inverted commas here), then you're probably, unknowingly or unwittingly, the product. Harsh. But fair. It's our content that the social networks monetize and that allows them to keep their servers and disk storage up and running. You might have seen that previous slide with the Tech Crunch post and be thinking "ah, but Flickr Pro is chargeable and if my subscription lapses I can't get my photos back". That's actually not really true, if not particularly simple, but bear with me for a few more slides.

Slide 30

Now let's forget "big data" for a moment and think about "your data" instead. Actually, let's think about "my data" for a moment. As of last week, my social media footprint on Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Flickr looked something like this. Facebook's numbers would be up there too, but I'll get to that in a moment.

Now in the grand scheme of things, in the massive numbers thrown about around about "big data" this is but a drop in the ocean. But ...

Slide 31

I created these check-ins, status updates, tweets and photos. They're important to me. Very important to me.

Slide 32

And as Aaron Cope pointed our earlier this year, my small, insignificant contribution to big data is part of my own, very subjective, very personal, history.

Slide 33

As I may have mentioned before, I'm a geo-technologist and a high percentage of my explicit big data contribution has a geo or location component to it. I'd like to map our where I checked-in, I'd like to see where I was when I Tweeted or what photos I took at a particular location. Some of this "mappyness" already exists in some of the big data stores where my contributions live, but not all of it, it's far too niche and personal for that. But it's still important to me.

Slide 34

Remember, in 99% of the social networks I use, I'm not the customer, I'm contributing to the product. But how do my regularly used social networks fare here. Regardless of whether I own the data I put up there, how easy is it to get a copy of?

Slide 35

Firstly, what about a one click solution? Can I go to a particular page on the web and click the big button which says "give me a copy of my data".

Slide 36

Facebook is the only one of my 5 social networks that does this. Well, it almost does this. At least I'm sure I used to be able to do this.

Slide 37

I can still request a download of my information. But it now only seems to give me my status updates since I enabled Timeline on my account, though I can still get all of my photos and messages since 2008. Rather than say that this doesn't work, I'll just file this under "needs future investigation" and move on.

Slide 38

Sometimes this lack of a one button download of contributed data is a deliberate decision on the part of a given social network. Sometimes, it's a hope that with an API, some enterprising developer will do this, but most of the time, that doesn't always happen.

Slide 39

So talking of APIs, surely the remaining social networks will have an API and let me knock up some code to get a copy of my data contributions. Surely?

Slide 40

Not all social networks do. An API tends to come after a social network's launch, if it comes at all, and often it doesn't let me do all that I want to do.

Slide 41

Thankfully, all the networks I used, with the exception of Twitter not only provide an API, but let me use that API to get my data. All of my data.

Slide 42

This is a good thing and meets the requirements for an API to meet what Kellan Elliot McCrea calls "minimal competence". He went on to say

"The ability to get out the data you put in is the bare minimum. All of it, at high fidelity, in a reasonable amount of time.

The bare minimum that you should be building, bare minimum that you should be using, and absolutely the bare minimum you should be looking for in tools you allow and encourage people who aren’t builders to use."

Slide 43

Kellan was behind Flickr's API and his sentiments are, to my mind, admirable.

Slide 44

Sadly, Twitter doesn't let me do this and fails the minimal competence test miserably. Deep in their API documentation I found the justification for this as being essential to ensure Twitter's stability and performance and leave it as an exercise to you the audience to work out what I think of this excuse.

Slide 45

The sad truth here is that when it comes to our own individual online data history, there's not always a willingness to make it easy for us to get copies of our history, if it's even on the radar at all.

Slide 46

But if we can't always get our data history back, maybe the solution is to make an archive of it before it goes in or keep that archive up to date as you go ... a personal digital archive or PDA (and not to be confused with personal electronic organisers, or PDAs, such as the Palm Pilot).

Slide 47

Thanks to web APIs and another social network, admittedly one for people who know how to code, a lot of this is already possible and the scope, range and functionality is growing by the day. The irony that I can build my own personal digital archive out of code found on another social network, which itself is built around a source code archival system is not lost on me either.

Slide 48

So, firstly, there's my own Instagram (and no, I'm not going to share the URL of where this lives I'm afraid. The idea here is that this is a personal archive, not a clone of a social network).

Slide 49

My own Instagram is called parallel-ogram. It's on GitHub; you can download it, configure it, run it. For free.

https://vtny.org/jQ Slide 50

Parallel-ogram works as well on my phone as it does on my laptop, showing me exactly what I've uploaded to Instagram. Indeed, it goes one step further than Instagram as currently there's no way to see what you've uploaded other than through their mobile app. Parallel-ogram doesn't allow me to take photos or upload them, at least not yet, but it does allow me to go back to the day I first uploaded a photo, grabs copies for me and twice a day it uses the Instagram API to see what I may have uploaded and quietly grabs a copy and stashes it away for me.

Slide 53

There's also my own archive of Foursquare ...

Slide 54

It's called privatesquare and it's also on GitHub

https://vtny.org/jR Slide 55

Like parallel-ogram, privatesquare quietly uses the Foursquare API to go back to my first check-in and twice a day quietly synchs my check-ins for me. I can go back and look at them, see maps of them and browse my check-in history. Unlike parallel-ogram, privatesquare also allows me to check-in, even if I don't want to share this with Foursquare. In short it allows me to use it both as an archive and also as a check-in tool, and if I want to use Foursquare's official mobile app, I can do that, safe and secure in the knowledge that privatesquare will keep itself up to date.

Slide 61

I take a lot of photos. Some of them go into Instagram. All of them go into Flickr. But I can archive Flickr as well.

Slide 62

It's called parallel-flickr, it also lives on GitHub and it's also filed under "something I really must install, configure and get running when I have some spare time".

https://vtny.org/jS Slide 63

So I have my own archives of Instagram, Flickr and Foursquare. I sort of have my own archive of Facebook. But what about my Tweets?

Slide 64

Well until Twitter decides that their site is stable enough to let me grab my Tweets through their archive, the next best solution is to archive by another means. I've put the RSS feed to my Tweet-stream into Google Reader, which helpfully never throws anything away. I did this a long time ago and I have almost all, but 100% all of my Tweets. Now all I need to do is write some code to read them from Google Reader and then get the Tweet data from Twitter, which then do allow via their API. Sadly, this is also filed under "something I must do when I have the time". It's not perfect, but then again, none of what I've discussed is, but it's a start and that's good enough for the time being.

Slide 65

Finally, you might have noticed the links in my slides look sort of like bitly links, only on the vtny.org domain. That's because I've been archiving my short links for a few years now

Slide 66

Using my own short URL archive and my own, self hosted, URL shortener. I just thought I'd mention that.

Slide 67

So, my big data contribution, my personal online history, is important to me. Yours might be important to you too. We're often told that we can't have our cake and eat it, but with the advent of the personal digital archive, maybe we can thanks to the enterprising people who create APIs in the first place and those who not only use these APIs but also put their code up for all the world to use, free of charge. Your online history may not be that important in the grand scheme of things, but it's your online history, it's personal, you made it. When social networks go the place where software goes to die, you might just want to preserve that personal history before the servers get powered off forever. Maybe the geeks will inherit the Earth after all.

Slide 68

Thank you for listening.

Converting Markdown To HTML; In Any Mac Text Editor (With A Little Help From Automator)

There must be a truism somewhere out on the interwebs that goes something like this ...

if a computer geek finds himself or herself doing a task repeatedly, he or she will invariably find a way to automate this task

... and if there isn't a truism to this effect, then I've just written it for the first time.

In this particular case, the repetitive task was converting text written using John Gruber's Markdown syntax into HTML. Those of you who know Markdown will be asking the question "but Markdown is already a text-to-HTML conversion tool, why would you want to do this?". They'd be right too, so an explanation is due.

Each time I update one of my WordPress plugins, I use the updated readme file as the basis for updating the respective plugin's home page on my, WordPress powered, blog. Now I could use one of the existing WordPress plugins that allows me to write Markdown inside WordPress. I could, but I haven't. This is because, for now at least, Markdown support in WordPress is an all or nothing approach. Either you use Markdown everywhere or you don't use it at all. That's not good enough for my use case. I want to use Markdown selectively, on a few select pages only.

So I looked for a way of being able to convert the Markdown text of one of my plugin's readme files in a more selective fashion. I wanted to be able to take a readme.txt file in my text editor of choice and convert it from Markdown into the page I was currently editing in WordPress in the browser. A not inconsiderable amount of web surfing later and I had a solution which almost but not quite got me 75% of where I wanted to be. Adding in support for the current version of Mac OS X and adding a small amount of extra functionality got me to 90%. Now granted, 90% isn't 100%, but to my mind 90% is far better than 0% and 0% was the repetitive task of selecting, copying and pasting the sections of the readme into WordPress and manually converting the Markdown syntax into HTML tags. This is not only repetitive, it's error prone and downright tedious.

Firstly install Markdown on your Mac. There's a variety of ways of doing this but as I already use Homebrew to install all manner of command line stuff, I checked to see if Markdown was supported by the brew command and went ahead and installed it.

$ brew search markdown
markdown    multimarkdown   peg-markdown
$ brew install markdown
==> Downloading https://daringfireball.net/projects/downloads/Markdown_1.0.1.zip
######################################################################## 100.0%
/usr/local/Cellar/markdown/1.0.1: 2 files, 40K, built in 2 seconds
$ which markdown
/usr/local/bin/markdown

Then fire up Automator, located at /Applications/Automator.app. Choose Service as the type of Workflow you want to create.

Add the Run Shell Script Action, which is located under the Utilities section of the Actions Library.

Homebrew installed Markdown as /usr/local/bin/markdown so change the default Action from cat to the path to Markdown. I also chose to make the output replace the text I had selected, you may or may not want to do this.

Then add the Copy To Clipboard Action, again located under the Utilities section of the Actions Library.

Then save your workflow and give it a meaningful name; Automator will save this as Markdown.workflow in your ~/Library/Services folder.

Now I can use this workflow to convert Markdown formatted text to HTML. The workflow I'd just created is now available through the Services menu of any text editor on the Mac. I'm using TextMate but this applies to all apps on the Mac that are capable of working with plain text. If you load up a Markdown formatted file in your text editor of choice and go to the Services menu item, you won't see your workflow initially.

You need to select the text you want to convert. Then go back to the Services menu item and you'll see Markdown as a Text Service. Click on this and your highlighted text will be converted to HTML in situ and the resultant HTML will also be on the clipboard as well, ready for pasting into WordPress or whatever you want to use to hold this HTML.

You can also get access to the Services menu by Control-clicking on the highlighted text as well.

As Aaron Cope once said, The label on the tin reads: "It ain't pretty or classy but it works" and for now, that 90% I mentioned earlier is good enough.

You Are Here; Map Wallpaper For Your Laptop

map wallpaper as a mild form of pejorative; meaning maps that are great for showing geographical context but which don't really show anything else. I'm also guilty of overusing the phrase eye candy; something which is eye catching but ultimately superficial.

Then along comes an eye candy map wallpaper app for my MacBook Pro and all pejoratives are instantly replaced with superlatives. Yes, this is eye candy. Yes, this is map wallpaper. But in this case the geographical context is spot on and it's definitely eye catching without being superficial in any way.

I've recently been guilty of using the term map wallpaper as a mild form of pejorative; meaning maps that are great for showing geographical context but which don't really show anything else. I'm also guilty of overusing the phrase eye candy; something which is eye catching but ultimately superficial.

Then along comes an eye candy map wallpaper app for my MacBook Pro and all pejoratives are instantly replaced with superlatives. Yes, this is eye candy. Yes, this is map wallpaper. But in this case the geographical context is spot on and it's definitely eye catching without being superficial in any way.

The man behind this wonderful piece of geolocated satellite imagery is Tom Taylor, who has previously blown my mind with his Boundaries visualisation of how London's neighbourhoods are perceived by way of Flickr's Alpha shape files.

The app is Satellite Eyes which, once installed on your Mac (sorry Windows and Linux users, you can't come to the party), hooks into the geolocation functionality built into the operating system and pulls down Bing's satellite imagery and uses it for your wallpaper, centred around your current location, such as where I live in the wilds of South West London.

Move around a city with your laptop moving with you and the imagery updates itself. Yesterday morning I was in London's Soho Square and sure enough, my laptop knew this and showed me, together with an overhead view of the construction sites for London's CrossRail project.

Map wallpaper in the truest sense of the word. What isn't there to like about this?

If You Live In The UK, You Need To Know About The Communications Data Bill

Of Robots And Teapots; Web Geeks Are Not Without A Sense Of Humour

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into their respective site's robots.txt file. Sadly, it looks like Yelp's robots.txt is now unfunny and businesslike, but Last.fm's subversion of this file is still there.

There's a line from the first Matrix movie, the only really good one out of the trilogy, where Morpheus says earnestly to Neo ... fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. It's time to add a corollary to this quote, along the lines of web geeks, it seems, are not without a sense of humour.

Last year, it was the web geeks who run the web servers for Yelp and Last.fm sticking Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into their respective site's robots.txt file. Sadly, it looks like Yelp's robots.txt is now unfunny and businesslike, but Last.fm's subversion of this file is still there.

$ curl -X get www.last.fm/robots.txt
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /music?
Disallow: /widgets/radio?

Disallow: /harming/humans
Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
Disallow: /harm/to/self

But it seems like the BBC's web geeks also are not without a sense of humour. Earlier today, I happened across one of the more bizarre HTTP status codes out there on the interwebs. Not your usual HTTP 200 Success or HTTP 404 Not Found, but HTTP 418 I'm A Teapot ...

418 I'm a teapot (RFC 2324) This code was defined in 1998 as one of the traditional IETF April Fools' jokes, in RFC 2324, Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and is not expected to be implemented by actual HTTP servers. However, known implementations do exist.

no, really. Take a look at the BBC's CBeebies site if you don't believe me.

The page even returns a HTTP 418 status.

Thanks are due to fellow ex-Yahoo! David Overton for pointing this gem out. Honourable second place mention is also due to HTTP 420 Enhance Your Calm.

420 Enhance Your Calm (Twitter) Returned by the Twitter Search and Trends API when the client is being rate limited. Likely a reference to this number's association with marijuana. Other services may wish to implement the 429 Too Many Requests response code instead. The phrase "Enhance Your Calm" is a reference to Demolition Man. In the film, Sylvester Stallone's character John Spartan is a hot-head in a generally more subdued future, and is regularly told to "Enhance your calm" rather than a more common phrase like "calm down".

... web geeks, it seems, are not without a sense of humour.

On UK Censorship (And Robert Heinlein)

industry body. I'm not going to comment on whether this web site blocking is enabled by legislation that was effectively rushed onto the statute books despite strong protest from the UK tech community and without that community having the opportunity to present their side of the case. I'm not going to comment on whether such sites really do destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists or whether any evidence to support such views has been presented. I'm not going to comment on the apparent hypocracy of blocking a web site which hosts links to content which may or may not be infrininging copyright and intellectual property yet not block a web site which actively hosts content which may or may not be infringing.

There are many things I'm not going to comment on here. I'm not going to comment on whether we live in a democracy in the UK or not, nor whether it's democratic or not to block access to a particular web site on the sole say-so of an industry body. I'm not going to comment on whether this web site blocking is enabled by legislation that was effectively rushed onto the statute books despite strong protest from the UK tech community and without that community having the opportunity to present their side of the case. I'm not going to comment on whether such sites really do destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists or whether any evidence to support such views has been presented. I'm not going to comment on the apparent hypocracy of blocking a web site which hosts links to content which may or may not be infrininging copyright and intellectual property yet not block a web site which actively hosts content which may or may not be infringing.

I'm not going to comment on the loss of access that unsigned UK musicians and artists have to The Promo Bay or whether the aforementioned industry body doesn't think that's an issue because these musicians and artists are unsigned. Nor am I going to comment on the fact that despite a particular web site being blocked here in the UK, a simple web search for pirate bay mirror shows that the block is on a single domain name and thus pretty much ineffective.

I'm also not going to comment on what I think about paying a monthly subscription to access the internet over my home broadband connection, the entire internet, only to be told by my government and by this industry body that I can't do this for certain sites that they, effectively, don't like, and that, effectively, that it's for my own good.

What I am going to comment on is that like or loath the music industry bodies (not the musicians and artists I hasten to add), the record companies and the British ISPs who are forced to comply with this legislation, this is out and out censorship. I'm also going to quote the late, great Robert Heinlein who had this to say ...

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you may not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything--you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

... and I'm also going to comment that I think these are very wise words indeed.

Foursquare Goes With OpenStreetMap; On The Web

little announcement" of the location based, check-in, company's decision to oust Google Maps and instead to go with OpenStreetMap data, by way of MapBox.

From reading a lot of the coverage you'd be forgiven for thinking that Foursquare has completely severed ties with Google's mapping APIs, but this isn't quite the story. As ReadWriteWeb notes in the last paragraph of its coverage, "Foursquare's iPhone and Android apps won't be affected" as the move is for Foursquare's home on the web, foursquare.com, only.

In web and location circles, much has been made of Foursquare's recent "little announcement" of the location based, check-in, company's decision to oust Google Maps and instead to go with OpenStreetMap data, by way of MapBox.

From reading a lot of the coverage you'd be forgiven for thinking that Foursquare has completely severed ties with Google's mapping APIs, but this isn't quite the story. As ReadWriteWeb notes in the last paragraph of its coverage, "Foursquare's iPhone and Android apps won't be affected" as the move is for Foursquare's home on the web, foursquare.com, only.

Indeed, the current set of Foursquare smartphone apps continue to use a variety of mapping platforms. On Android and on iOS, it's still Google Maps, not unsurprisingly given Android is effectively a Google mobile OS, and Google is still Apple's mapping platform of choice, for now at least.

On Blackberry it's also business as usual for Google Maps, whilst on Symbian, it's Nokia's mapping platform and on Windows Phone 7 it's (currently) the Bing mapping platform.

So while this move is great news for both the OpenStreetMap community and for MapBox and, as ReadWriteWeb notes, "when you use Foursquare Explore on the Web to search for places, you'll be taking eyeballs away from Google", this is a move that affects Foursquare's web presence only, not their mobile apps. Given that in order to actually use Foursquare effectively, in other words, to check-in, you need to be on a smartphone, I wonder how many eyeballs will actually be taken away from Google. Furthermore, whilst those in the location industry are looking at this keenly, I have to wonder how many users of Foursquare will actually notice the change on the web.

For Foursquare on the web this is probably a smart move and for most users of the Foursquare website, OpenStreetMap data is, as Muki Haklay noted in a paper published in 20101, "good enough".

But not good enough apparently for some Foursquare users, who are fairly outspoken about blank or incomplete maps on the comments to Foursquare's announcement blog post.

It would be good to think that Foursquare's use of OpenStreetMap data will encourage their users to contribute to the underlying open spatial data set that is OSM; after all, all you really need is a GPS device, which is what most smartphones are these days. The optimist in me hopes that this will be the case. The pessimist in me, or maybe it's the realist in me, tempers that hope with the realisation that Foursquare still makes the address of a new Place optional, that a geocode from a GPS device probably isn't enough and that most Foursquare users neither know or care about the underlying map, caring far more about getting to the top of the leaderboard, becoming Mayor and earning badges.

Time alone will tell whether my optimistic side is right.

WP Biographia Hits v2.1.1 In Time For Christmas

WordPress forums as well as emails hitting my Inbox, suppressing the display of the Biography Box for some users ranks highest on the list of requested features.

So it's good to be able to say that as of v2.1.1 of the plugin, you can now do this and v2.1.1 is now live and able to be downloaded from GitHub as well as from within WordPress or via the WordPress plugin repository.

WP Biographia's always had the ability to suppress the display of the plugin's Biography Box for all users; unfortunately that's been accomplished by simply not installing the plugin. But judging from requests on the WordPress forums as well as emails hitting my Inbox, suppressing the display of the Biography Box for some users ranks highest on the list of requested features.

So it's good to be able to say that as of v2.1.1 of the plugin, you can now do this and v2.1.1 is now live and able to be downloaded from GitHub as well as from within WordPress or via the WordPress plugin repository.

New!

As well as supporting the latest v3.3 version of the WordPress core, the complete list of changes for this latest version of the plugin is ...

As always, the WP Biographia home page has the full details. Consider this, if you will, an early visit from Santa. What's next for the plugin? Internationalisation is probably on the cards as well as converting the plugin to use classes and not a simple set of WordPress PHP functions; but all of that will have to wait until after the Holiday season. Photo Credits: Sam. D. on Flickr.

W3G 2011; Musings On A Geo Unconference

W3G (un)conference kicked off the annual three day UK geo-fest that is formed of one day's worth of W3G followed in quick succession by two day's worth of AGI GeoCommunity.

After last year's inaugural geo-festivities in Stratford-upon-Avon, this year W3G grabbed firmly onto the shirt-tails of its big brother, in the shape of GeoCommunity, and relocated to the East Midlands Conference Centre on the grounds of Nottingham University, which is aptly located in, err, Nottingham.

On September 20th, with a new venue and a new tag line, the second W3G (un)conference kicked off the annual three day UK geo-fest that is formed of one day's worth of W3G followed in quick succession by two day's worth of AGI GeoCommunity.

After last year's inaugural geo-festivities in Stratford-upon-Avon, this year W3G grabbed firmly onto the shirt-tails of its big brother, in the shape of GeoCommunity, and relocated to the East Midlands Conference Centre on the grounds of Nottingham University, which is aptly located in, err, Nottingham.

W3G Tee-Shirt

Benefitting from a purpose built conference centre with great in-house catering, great sized conference rooms with massive projection screens, industrial sized quantities of coffee and working wifi, W3G 2011 was a very different beast from 2010's. Except for the bit about the working wifi as half of the time it didn't. Work, that is.

Some things remained the same. A couple of invited guest speakers to kick the morning and afternoon sessions off. The unconference wall, which fellow organiser Rollo Home and myself fretted over filling with sessions but which miraculously was filled with offers of talks before the morning coffee break was over. The inevitable geobeers and geocurry to wrap the day's proceedings up. The aforementioned conference wifi dropping out on a regular basis. The irreverent session titles, which always turned out to be fascinating when you listened to them;  "Dinosaurs, Concorde & the Wedge of Geo" anyone?

The Wedge Of Geo?

But some things were different. Firstly the venue. Despite the inevitable wifi issues W3G was for the first time in a purpose built conference venue rather than in a hotel than happened to host conferences and events and the EMCC was a big hit with everyone. Also the ties with the AGI were made much clearer this year with W3G featuring on the reverse of the GeoCommunity swag bag and also meriting a double page spread on the printed GeoCommunity proceedings. It also didn't go unnoticed that a far greater proportion of the W3G audience were spotted at GeoCommunity the following two days. This is no bad thing and merely reaffirms the desire of the W3G organisers to use W3G as a channel into the wider scope of GeoCommunity and to increase awareness of the existence of and relevance that the AGI has to offer.

The second difference was, to put it bluntly, the number of attendees. I'm lucky enough to attend a lot of conferences and across the board numbers are down and sponsors are harder to attract. This year's W3G was no exception to the general trend but despite this there was an upside; the level of interaction, engagement and closeness between speakers, both invited and unconference and audience were simply unprecedented in my somewhat chequered conference experience. But this didn't only happen in the sessions themselves, this spilled over into between-session coffee breaks, across lunch and into the obligatory geobeers and geocurry.

W3G 2011

The third difference was the strap line for the event. Last year we used the 3 W's of Geo as a theme and, for a first conference, it worked well. This year we used Because There's More To Geo Than Just Maps And Checkins as a theme and it worked, but only halfway. Checkins were pretty much nowhere to be seen other than the inevitable fight over the Mayorship of the conference and the venue on Foursquare. Maps on the other hand were pretty much everywhere, from Steven Feldman's abridged History of Web Mapping talk (run, don't walk over to SlideShare to see the whole slide deck) through to all of the other unconference sessions. Despite the much predicted death of the map, the map, it would seem, is very much alive, well and positively thriving.

So will W3G be back next year? All the signs are that it will be. Will it be bigger and better than W3G 2011? Only time and the economy will tell if it will be bigger but after this year's event I think it's safe to say it will be better, thanks to the time, effort and overall geo enthusiasm that everyone put into the event.

WP Biographia Is But A Quarter Of The Way To WP Mappa

Matt Whatsit's fault; he writes very profane and very funny blog posts and reading his recent The Five Stages Of P****d Wife (which you should read if you haven't already, err, read it) made me laugh, hell, it made me ROFL and LMAO at the same time but it also made me think, though not necessarily about wives or drunkenness ...

Now background reading and general swotting up on a topic is all very well but to really learn how to do something you just have to roll your sleeves up and do it yourself. Though it's probably stretching a comparison too far, you don't learn to drive a car through reading the highway code; you actually get behind the wheel (preferably under supervision) and ... drive. You don't learn about what food tastes good from a recipe book; you ... taste the stuff yourself.

And so it is with writing code and using new and unfamiliar APIs. It was definitely the case with my recent (reacquaintance of, and) foray into JavaScript and the addition of support for Nokia's Ovi Maps API to the Mapstraction project, with the added benefit of having to teach myself how to move from my (by now very dated) knowledge of version and revision control under CVS to git.

In a way, this was all Matt Whatsit's fault; he writes very profane and very funny blog posts and reading his recent The Five Stages Of P****d Wife (which you should read if you haven't already, err, read it) made me laugh, hell, it made me ROFL and LMAO at the same time but it also made me think, though not necessarily about wives or drunkenness ...

Now background reading and general swotting up on a topic is all very well but to really learn how to do something you just have to roll your sleeves up and do it yourself. Though it's probably stretching a comparison too far, you don't learn to drive a car through reading the highway code; you actually get behind the wheel (preferably under supervision) and ... drive. You don't learn about what food tastes good from a recipe book; you ... taste the stuff yourself.

And so it is with writing code and using new and unfamiliar APIs. It was definitely the case with my recent (reacquaintance of, and) foray into JavaScript and the addition of support for Nokia's Ovi Maps API to the Mapstraction project, with the added benefit of having to teach myself how to move from my (by now very dated) knowledge of version and revision control under CVS to git.

May the source code be with you

So, first JavaScript and Mapstraction and the Nokia Maps API and now to PHP and the WordPress API. There's a lot of WordPress plugins that do geo-related stuff with your blog but none of them actually do what I want. WP Geo comes close, but it uses Google Maps and Google Maps only. Now I have nothing against Google Maps or the Google Maps APIs but I want maps from the company I work for on my blog.

When I came to add Nokia's Maps API to Mapstraction I at least had a head start. I'd done some JavaScript and I was at least familiar with the Mapstraction API. But writing a WordPress plugin was another thing entirely. Despite hosting my blog on WordPress since 2004 and being able to hack a moderate amount of PHP, I'd never needed to use the WordPress API. Until now.

Bearing in mind the old adage about walking before you can run I decided the best way to tackle this was to write a WordPress plugin for something much more simplistic and this is where Matt Whatsit comes in. At the foot of each post is a nice little biography; in Matt's case it read "Stole some Chewits in 1979. The guilt still haunts me".

So I searched for a plugin that would give me this capability. There's lots. But as with the desire for a geo-related plugin, none of them did exactly what I wanted. The closest I could find was Jon Bishop's WP About Author plugin. So, as all WordPress plugins are licensed under the version 2 of the GNU Public License, I took Jon's plugin and hacked it to do what I wanted it to do. The result is what I've called WP Biographia and you should be able to see the results of it at the foot of this post, if you're reading it from this URL.

I now know, or at least understand at a conceptual level with much web searching of the WordPress Codex, how to write and structure a WordPress plugin. I still need to know how to write and structure a WordPress widget but that will form part of the next version of WP Biographia. By then, I should be armed with enough WordPress API knowledge to start to write what I really wanted to write, which is my geo-related plugin, which may, or may not be called WP Mappa. I'm only a quarter of the way there, but it's a quarter more than when I started this.

In the meantime, WP Biographia is now part of the official WordPress plugin repository and is also up on github as well. It also now has a resident page here on my blog which I'll update as and when I make sufficient changes and improvements to warrant a new version.

Starting to code again is addictive and I seem to have managed to rack up a few github repositories of recent. WP Biographia is but one of what I've christened, in line with the theme of Gary's Bloggage, Gary's Codeage. For now, it's a holding pen for those code projects that live in github but for which I've yet to write a formal page on. These may appear sometime in the not too distant future as and when time permits.

Photo Credits: ficek1618 on Flickr.

Mapstraction, Maps and Me

Nokia has been taking up almost all of my time and what little time has been left has been spent with my family. But in between day job and family time there's evenings spent in a hotel room and hours spent on a plane, mainly between London's Heathrow and Berlin's Tegel airports. It's in these periods of time that a combination of my MacBook Pro, running a combo of Apache/MySQL/PHP with MAMP and TextMate has allowed me to rediscover the pleasure of what I used to do for my day job before Yahoo! and before Nokia ... and that's to write code.

It's been a while since my last blog post; my day job at Nokia has been taking up almost all of my time and what little time has been left has been spent with my family. But in between day job and family time there's evenings spent in a hotel room and hours spent on a plane, mainly between London's Heathrow and Berlin's Tegel airports. It's in these periods of time that a combination of my MacBook Pro, running a combo of Apache/MySQL/PHP with MAMP and TextMate has allowed me to rediscover the pleasure of what I used to do for my day job before Yahoo! and before Nokia ... and that's to write code.

As a fully unreconstructed maps nerd, I love the variety and richness of the mapping APIs available on today's internet. One of the best books on how to use these mapping APIs is the "does just what it says on the label" Map Scripting 101 by Adam DuVander. While the book touches on the power of the APIs from Google, from Yahoo, and from Bing (amongst others) its main focus in on Mapstraction, the JavaScript mapping abstraction library.

Brain Map

As the name suggest, Mapstraction abstracts, or wraps, the differences between the variety of approaches that each JavaScript mapping API uses into a single consistent interface. With Mapstraction, the API methods to create a map, to change the zoom level, to centre the map, to add a marker or push pin to the map are the same, regardless of which underlying mapping API you use.

Mapstraction allowed you to use the mapping APIs from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Cloudmade, GeoCommons, Cartocuidad, Yandex and MapQuest. But not Nokia's Ovi Maps API, which was released in February 2011. This is where my local Apache installation, TextMate and the aforementioned hotel room and flight time comes back into the story. Cue a frantic crash course to reacquaint myself with JavaScript, some trial and error, some swearing and some background reading to convert my slightly outdated knowledge of CVS into how to use git and Mapstraction now supports the Ovi Maps API. No, really. It's on github right now.

There's a demo of some of the major features of both Mapstraction and the Ovi Maps API over at maps.vicchi.org and, in the spirit of social coding, the source for that is on github as well.

I'm not suggesting for one moment that if the current geo day job falls through I can happily pick up a replacement role coding JavaScript, or coding anything for that matter, but it's oddly reassuring that I still have the vague ability to continue the profession of coding software that earnt me a living for almost 25 years.

Photo Credits: Infidelic on Flickr.

Mapping The Might Have Been

London Tube Map Archive shows just how much the Tube network has expanded and contracted over the years and how stations have changed not only in name but sometimes in position as well. But some of these maps also show what was planned but which was never realised; as Trent Reznor once put it "all the what abouts, the might have and could have beens". Take a look at this map of the network from 1938.

The moment you make a map there's a fairly good chance that it will be out of date. There's nothing wrong with this; anyone who works in the cartography or mapping fields will tell you that one of the biggest challenges in making maps is not making the map, it's keeping it up to date once it's made. Geography is constantly moving, changing, flowing thing.

One of the most fascinating aspects of old maps is not so much looking at what's changed since they were made, though that is fascinating enough, but of what might have been but then never was.

Regular readers of this blog may have worked out that out of all the maps there are, my favourite is the London Underground Tube map. A browse through the London Tube Map Archive shows just how much the Tube network has expanded and contracted over the years and how stations have changed not only in name but sometimes in position as well. But some of these maps also show what was planned but which was never realised; as Trent Reznor once put it "all the what abouts, the might have and could have beens". Take a look at this map of the network from 1938.

1938 Tube Map

The lines marked under contruction are part of what was called the New Works Programme and some of them that are shown on the map did get built. The eastern and western Central Line extensions were completed, though only as far as West Ruislip in the east and not to Denham as planned. The extension of the Bakerloo line from Baker Street to Stanmore was also built and now forms part of today's Jubilee Line. But the Northern Heights Plan, the criss cross of lines branching off from the Northern Line never reached completion. The extension north of Edgware, the link between Edgware and Mill Hill East to Finchley and the extension to Alexandra Palace from Finsbury Park via Highgate were all finally dropped in 1954.

2004 Tube Map

There's a strange parallel between 1939's Tube map and one produced by Transport For London in 2004, showing how the map would look in 2016. A scaled down version of Crossrail is currently being tunneled underneath central London, but there's no sign yet of the Cross River Transit linking Brixton and Peckham with Camden, nor is there any sign of the West London Transit linking Shepherds Bush with Uxbridge via Ealing Broadway. Heathrow Terminal 5 on the Piccadilly Line was built and now links to Paddington but as part of the Heathrow Express and not Crossrail and there's no sign of the Metropolitan Line linking Watford and Watford Junction.

As a closing note which will probably be only of interest to my Teddington readers (Hi Ed !!), a branch of Crossrail was also planned to start at Kingston and link with the main Crossrail route somewhere west of today's Ladbroke Grove station, taking in Teddington, Twickenham and Richmond along the way. In the light of today's spending cuts and economic climate, it sadly looks like the scope of the network envisaged back in 2004 will never be fully realised, consigning 2004's map of the Underground network to the same level of historical curiosity that 1938's map has today.

Map Credits: London Reconnections and The London Tube Map Archive.

Society of Cartographers Redux

Society of Cartographers Summer School in Manchester, UK. It's always great to be invited to speak at a conference but I was particularly excited by the SoC. The geo world I inhabit is one of data, APIs, platforms and data mining and aggregation techniques. Sometimes the map gets lost in all of this. So it was an honour to speak at an event where it was all about the map. The Summer School was written up in November's edition of the SoC Newsletter which is only available to society members, but with permission I've reproduced below the sections of the newsletter which cover my involvement.

To be filed under the "slightly self promoting" department, earlier this year I was invited to speak at the Society of Cartographers Summer School in Manchester, UK. It's always great to be invited to speak at a conference but I was particularly excited by the SoC. The geo world I inhabit is one of data, APIs, platforms and data mining and aggregation techniques. Sometimes the map gets lost in all of this. So it was an honour to speak at an event where it was all about the map. The Summer School was written up in November's edition of the SoC Newsletter which is only available to society members, but with permission I've reproduced below the sections of the newsletter which cover my involvement.

Welcome to the world of the geo data silo: where closed data is open and open data is closed - Gary Gale (Nokia)

Inspired by London Transport maps, various historical maps and his son, Gary has been involved with maps and mapping for many years. His entertaining, informative and well-illustrated lecture took delegates on a short trip along the route taken by location-based communications from smoke signals, pigeons, the compass, maps such as the Mappa Mundi, radio signals and triangulation through to today’s maps as seen in smart phone with GPS-based mobile devices. He then turned his attention to data, silos of data and the “geo-industry” where the map doesn’t seem to be important any more; it’s all about the data and the map is often strangely absent.

Gary then took delegates on another trip, this time into the dark world of ‘Geo-Babel’, where we have data, lots of data, wide and varied, some commercial (Navteq and Teleatlas), some authoritative (Britain’s Ordnance Survey) and some of it crowd- sourced and growing aggressively (OpenStreetMap), some from unlikely sources (Flickr) and some from location-based social networking services (Foursquare and Gowalla). All this data, often available and free, a cartographer’s dream, but wait, Gary explains that there is now a darker side to data. Much of this ‘free’ data appears to be locked in its own private little data silos, ironically at a time when previously proprietary data becomes unlocked and open (Ordnance Survey), crowd-sourced data becomes locked behind a well meaning but restrictive license, the question is posed to delegates, how can we, as part of the geo-industry, dig ourselves out of this hole? Mike Shand

Panel discussion: “All this data is good but what about the cartography?”

The last session of the conference was setup as a panel discussion, with the theme of “All this data is good, but what about the cartography?” In order to start the ball rolling the preceding presentation was by Gary Gale (Nokia/Ovi Maps). His grandly entitled presentation - Welcome to the world of the geo data silo; where closed data is open and open data is closed - certainly resonated with me, particularly “the four horsemen of the geopocalypse”. Gary sat aside to allow his fellow panelists a short rant-space each. Richard Fairhurst concentrated on his vision of carto-goodness. He made an interesting analogy between industrial carto (Google), Boing Boing carto (retro 8-bit games style map) and Artisan carto (cartography with care). For a laugh (I presume!) he proposed a figurehead for web cartography and then flipped up a slide with three figureheads - Jobs, Gates and Chilton. He was followed by Bob Barr with a wider view of maps and quality. I then tried to propose some questions to the panel (eg: you have shown examples of good/bad design - but what are you exactly looking for when you are making those choices?) - and then opened it up for audience participation and questions/comments. We really should have recorded this session as there was a wide- range of points made, few of which I can now recall! You really needed to be there to get the full impact of the panelists’ views and the lively discussion that ensued. Steve Chilton SoC Chair

When I last wrote about my theory of GeoBabel I seem to recall saying I was retiring it. That's still true but seeing as I didn't actually write the newsletter my geoconscience is clear on this point.

Grepping And Grokking The Etymology Of Grep

I've been thinking a lot about the etymology of place names recently. That's a slightly verbose way of saying that I've been thinking about the origin of place names and where they come from. Take London for example. That's pretty easy as most sources of information seem to agree that London derives from Londinium, the name of the Roman settlement from which the modern metropolis of London grew.

Then there's Teddington, the town on the River Thames at the upstream limit of the Tideway, where I currently live. Some people believe that the name derives from Tide's End Town; Rudyard Kipling was one of the people who subscribed to this version of the name's origin. Scholars though tend to believe that the town was named after a Saxon leader, called either Todyngton or Tutington, which morphed into the modern day name over the centuries.

All well and good but this sort of debate over the origin of a name is continuing even today and in a much more geekier vein. To paraphrase John Cleese in Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch, I was perusing the internet the other day and came across a discussion of the origins of the UNIX command grep. If you know your UNIX command line, you'll probably know that grep is the tool you use to search inside text files. Indeed, just as Robert Heinlein's grok has become part of today's technical culture as a synonym for understand, so grep has become a synonym for search ... I'm just grepping for the time the restaurant opens.

GREP. A photograph only a SysAdmin could love!

If you'd asked me last week how grep got its name, I'd have said with high confidence that it's an acronym for General Regular Expression Parser, G .. R .. E .. P, grep. But Mike Burns over at Giant Robot offers up an alternate etymology, albeit a rather contrived one to my mind, that the name originated from the commands to search for text within the ed text editor, thus when looking for the regular expression "re", you'd issue the command g/re/p. All of which looks nice and convenient but only works when you're looking for the string "re", which isn't that much of a common event when you think about it.

A bit of background research yields even more versions of how grep got its name. John Barry's book Technobabble offers up a whole slew of alternatives.

  • The November 1990 issue of the SunTech Journal states that grep is an acronym forGet Regular Expression and Print.
  • The December 1985 issue of UNIX World, thinks that it's really Globally search for a Regular Expression and Print.
  • A technical writer at Hewlett-Packard offers the alternative of Generalized Regular Expression Parser.
  • An Introduction to Berkeley UNIX disagrees; it's Generalized Regular Expression Pattern.
  • Don Libes and Sandy Ressler in Life With UNIX thinks it's Global Regular Expression Print.
  • And finally, the authors of UNIX For People prefer the definition as Global Regular Expression or Pattern.

That's 8 differing and conflicting definitions.

And the point of all of this etymological meandering? Well, today's internet community prides itself in being the ultimate source of information in today's society. Yet I find it deliciously ironic that we can pretty much agree on the origins of place names dating from Roman and from Saxon times but can't agree on the origin of a UNIX command that was created on March 3rd. 1973. The irony becomes even deeper when you consider that UNIX systems formed the backbone of the origins of today's internet and World Wide Web and that a substantial proportion of the servers on the net today still run UNIX, and thus still run the grep command. Photo Credits: Danny Howard on Flickr.