GeoGraphic

I took part in the excellent OpenDataChallenge in the NDRC here in Dublin this week.  It was a great event, with plenty of fascinating ideas, brilliant people and lots and lots of open data being worked with.

There will shortly be even more open data to work with, in Dublin at least, when the DubLinked initiative launches in September.

The project I chose to work on was led by Jane Ruffino, and focussed on opening, tagging and imbuing with context the vast amounts of Archaeological data that are currently locked away in reports and dusty museum stores. The interactive app is aimed at people who are interested in the heritage of their city, and Jane is hoping to develop the concept further via the NDRC LaunchPad programme, and the very best of luck to her.

One of the tasks I set myself during the challenge was to grab some of the publically available data from archaeology.ie and make it available in a more app friendly manner.  To do this I used Google Fusion Tables, and this is how I did it.

Before you start you’ll need a Google account.  If you use gmail or other google services you probably have one already, but if not you’ll need to set one up to gain access to Fusion Tables.

That noted, the first step is to go to archaeology.ie, click through to the Map Viewer and then click on the Tools icon and choose Download data.  You can filter your download by Class or by County. You should download the data in Shapefile format:

Once you have downloaded the data you need to upload it again.  A guy by the name of Josh Livni has built an online service which takes .zipped up shapefiles, reformats them to Google KML and uploads them to your Fusion Tables.  Simple and rather brilliant.  The service is called ‘Shape to FT’ and is available at http://www.shpescape.com/

You will need to grant the service access to your Google Account for it to work it’s magic. Simply browse to the .zip file you downloaded earlier and hit upload.  the import will take a minute or two.  Once it’s finished just click on the Fusion Table link and you’ll be able to see your data in tabular form in Fusion Tables. To view it in Map form, simply click on ‘Visualise > Map’ From there you can choose to share the table, or even embed it in another site, like this:

There are plenty of other options, including customising the info boxes, using color-coded symbols and classifications etc. but I’ll leave those as an exercise for the reader.

Next Sunday, April 10th, is Census day here in Ireland.  There has been much debate in the media and online over some of the questions asked on the census, particularly those relating to religion and partnership status.  The raising of these two issues in particular could be considered to be a reflection of social change in Ireland, something which the census itself sets out to measure, even if it does so in a way which many consider to be flawed.

Trying to accurately reflect these changes while maintaining links back to previous censuses dating back to 1901 and beyond is a very difficult problem and one which I feel that the CSO has done as well as it can to solve.

I am a GIS specialist who makes use of census data on an almost daily basis. I have written before about some of the kinds of analysis that can be done with the anonymised data which the CSO makes available to researchers.  I think it is fair to say that the census is the most important dataset which people working with Geographic Information in Ireland have available to them.  The fact that the results are made available at no charge to the end user is admirable and long may it continue.

There has been some debate, particularly in the UK, as to whether a census is needed at all.  States such as Denmark are frequently mentioned, as they did away with the manual census process used here in favour of a register based system back in the 1970′s.  A register based system is where different Government departments share their databases and citizens are obliged to inform the government of any change of residence, employment etc.  Some of the required registers are in place in Ireland, notably the General Register Office and GeoDirectory.  But I have my doubts that a Register based census could be established here given our current data protection legislation (among other issues)

What excites me most about Census 2011 is the new ‘Small Areas’ (PDF link) which are the smallest spatial unit for which data will be made available.  This will allow for a much more detailed view of all aspects of our society.  How so?  Well consider the case of the current smallest spatial unit used by the CSO since the early 1980′s – the District Electoral Division (DED).

There are approximately 3,400 DED’s covering the country, and they range in population size from 16 people (Arigna in Leitrim and Lackagh in Tipperary) up to 32,305 in the case of Blanchardstown-Blakestown.  That variation alone is a major problem and makes for skewed results if extreme care is not taken when doing any analysis of census data.  The new Small Areas, of which there are over 19,000, are nested within the DED’s for backwards compatibility, and have been designed to follow urban geometry and natural features.

Here’s an image of the Blanchardstown-Blakestown DED (in blue) with the new Small Areas shown in red:

Blanchardstown-Blakestown DED and Small Areas - Data Copyright OSi and Microsoft Bing

There are 119 Small Areas in the Blanchardstown-Blakestown DED alone, which will allow for much more insightful analysis of the population there – meaning more efficient and effective delivery of services, among a myriad of other benefits.

There has been much speculation that these small areas will form the basis of our new Postcode system (I’ve written about this before too, and I’m not expecting any system to be launched soon), but that remains to be seen.

It will be 18 months to 2 years before we see the census data released at the small area level, but I’m looking forward to being able to map our population in a never before seen level of detail.

If you’re interested in OpenStreetMap and are in Dublin on Wednesday 17th November then you might like to come along to a meetup with OSM users and entrepreneurs in The Schoolhouse Hotel at 4pm.

Cloudmade is a company which specialises in providing tools and API’s built on top of OpenStreetMap data. One of it’s founders, Nick Black, is in town for a few days and has kindly agreed to meet up for a chat / coffee / beer.

I met Nick at the State of the Map conference in 2009, and am looking forward to meeting him again to discuss OpenGeoData and the future of OpenStreetMap.

A number of other Irish OSMers will be there, so if you have any questions about the project, or just want to put names to faces then this is an ideal opportunity.

If you do fancy coming along then please let me know so I can keep an eye on numbers.

So the dust has finally settled on another GIS Ireland conference. I missed a few talks due to other commitments, but overall I was very impressed with the running of the conference this year. Attendance was only slightly down on last year, which is an excellent achievement in the current economic climate and despite the close proximity of a free event with a similar target audience in September. Hearty congratulations to all involved in running the show, well done.

Congratulations are also due to Gary Delaney of Loc8 Code for winning GIS project of the year. I had a couple of interesting discussions about Loc8 with Gary on the day, and the accolade is richly deserved. The Irish Environmental Protection Agency were awarded Best GIS Organisation, and Brendan Cunningham brought down the house with an excellent presentation on using FME to predict football results. You can see a video of Brendans prize-winning presentation on his blog here

I do have a couple of minor quibbles with the event, and would hope to see some attempts to address these next year. Firstly I thought that there were too many parallel sessions in the afternoon. With up to five talks happening simultaneously, some were inevitably poorly attended, which can be dispiriting to say the least. I would prefer to see no more than three parallel sessions. Perhaps the parallelisation could be extended to the morning of the conference, which would mean the diversity of the event could be preserved. This leads me on to the second quibble: INSPIRE. We know that it is vitally important, and we know that it is fraught with issues, but for many in the audience it is not an interesting, or inspiring, topic. If there was an INSPIRE track in the morning, with other talks running alongside then there would have been less need to run so many parallel sessions in the afternoon.

I would also like to see some focus on GIS 2.0 / neogeography / whatever it’s calling itself this week. At the recent AGI Geocommunity Conference in the UK they ran a one day free (un)conference before the main event, called the W3Gconf which was a great success by all accounts. The conference wrap-up can be seen here. I know that the Irish Geo community is a lot smaller than the UK’s but I am hoping to knock a few heads together over the coming months, with a view to running something similar (but probably on a much smaller scale) at GIS Ireland 2011 next year. If this is something that interests you please get in touch with me, either in comments below, or by email.

I’ve been using FourSquare for a few months now, I’m interested in it primarily because it uses an interesting method for gathering geographic data (or POI’s): the addition of a gaming element i.e. rewarding users for adding venues and frequenting places with points, badges and ‘Mayorships’

This is in contrast to the crowdsourcing element used by OpenStreetMap which is perhaps more altruistic, offering only the satisfaction that comes from making an excellent map a fraction better.

I have been wondering recently about the number of users that FourSquare has in Ireland. The service has reportedly hit 3 million users globally. The service’s API has rate limits which restricts the download of POI information, and currently there is no way to extract information about the number of users in a particular country. (If you find a way to generate this information please let me know)

Last Saturday night I was at Lansdowne Road for the Leinster v Munster Rugby Match.

Aviva Stadium Lansdowne Road

I checked in on FourSquare and noted that 56 other people had done likewise. The attendance at the match was reported as 50,645 (a record for a Magners League Match) Even allowing for the fact that the crowd at the match might not be entirely representative of the nation (certainly not with tickets priced at Eur50 and up) it is indicative of the penetration level of the service.  If we extrapolate the 0.1% checkin rate to the entire population of Ireland we arrive at an estimated total of 4,500 users in Ireland. The real number is probably significantly lower than that, as the matchgoing demographic almost certainly has higher than average levels of smartphone penetration and interest in social networking than the population as a whole.

It’ll be interesting to compare these numbers with upcoming Soccer Internationals and Heineken Cup / Six Nations matches in Lansdowne (Anybody got spare tickets for those?

As an aside, how many checkins are these users performing?  I travelled to Cork at the end of July and noted that Heuston Station had 1,100 checkins at the time. As of today, 10 weeks later, that number is now 1,552, which works out at about 40 checkins per week in this venue, which is a popular one on FourSquare.

And which is Ireland’s most checked-into venue? I think it might be Dublin Airport, with 4,177 checkins.

You can see my FourSquare page here: http://foursquare.com/user/manaboutcouch

UPDATE: April 2011.

I didn’t make it to Lansdowne for the Leinster v Leicester match last night, but 52,000 people did, and a number of them checked in on FourSquare:

Strangely enough it seems that pretty much exactly the same number of people checked in last October as did last night.  We need to allow for the fact that a fair number of last night’s crowd were English and may not have wanted to run up a charge for roaming data on their phone, but I think this is a useful data point.  It indicates to me that FourSquare growth is pretty flat here in Ireland – but it’s only a single data point and should be taken with a huge grain of salt.