GeoGraphic

I have been doing a lot of Address Geocoding at work lately.  This is the process of taking addresses and turning them into points on a map.  It’s a fairly simple task in most countries, but here in Ireland we don’t have a postal geography, or postcode system, which makes the task quite difficult.

My employer specialises in this kind of work and has built a number of systems to partly automate the task and verify the accuracy of the results.  It’s pretty impressive stuff and I hope to write about it in more detail in the near future.

Today I ran a public dataset of some interest through the system – the locations of the 84 properties auctioned at last week’s high profile sale in The Shelbourne.

An Excel spreadsheet of the data is available from here and a Google Map/Earth compatible .kml file can be downloaded from here.

Here’s the map, you can click on the pins to reveal underlying data, such as the reserve price and price achieved:

View Larger Map

As is always the case in dealing with Irish addresses, there may be some error in the precise location of these points.  If you want to know more about the process, or if you’re interested in visualising your address data I’d be delighted to hear from you.

I have been looking online for maps of Dáil Constituencies and have found most of them are quite poor. The Oireachtas publish a National Map (Available here – 720k PDF ) which is of debateable quality.  To be fair the constituency profiles they publish are quite a decent analysis of basic population census data.

Following a request from Robert Cassidy I have created a couple of basic maps for the Galway East constituency. The base data is sourced from OpenStreetMap and is overlaid onto a backdrop of terrain data from the NASA SRTM project. The District Electoral Division boundary files are from the Central Statistics Office.

Base Map of Galway East

I did a quick statistical analysis of the total population in the Constituency to derive the classes below.

Population in 2006 - Galway East

CAP payments, per farmer

Those fine gentlemen over at The Story have been digging up more data, this time in relation to Common Agricultural Policy payments to Irish farmers. The original data was sourced from www.farmsubsidy.org

The data has been made available for download and people are already adding their own analyses.

I thought I’d add my tuppence by looking at the number of farmers in each county and deriving an average payment on a per county basis. I then threw this onto a standard base map. The source data is in this excel spreadsheet: CAP_Farmers

On twitter earlier @EvertB asked if I could help with putting a map together.  Here it is:

Decree Points - click for larger version

I made a slightly cleaner .pdf version too, you can get it here.

I will update this post with the process used to make the map later on.

Where are the commuters?

(Click for larger version)

The CSO have recently made DED boundary data available for use by the public. You can download the shapefiles from here: http://beyond2020.cso.ie/censusasp/saps/boundaries/census2006_boundaries.htm Loading this data into a Geographic Information System (GIS) enables the production of maps such as the above.

This map is a first pass attempt to show commuter-ville – Areas of the country where large proportions of the population drive long distances to work.  As can be seen, areas near large towns have fewer long distance commuters than more isolated areas, which is fully expected.  Nevertheless there are some areas; North county Dublin, parts of county Meath and Northern Kildare in particular, where a significantly larger than average proportion of the population was commuting over 15km to work in 2006, despite these areas containing large towns and villages. How are these areas faring in the current economic climate? It would be an interesting analysis to compare these results to localised trends in house prices – something that might be possible with analysis of data from The Daft Report.