GeoGraphic

While browsing Google Maps earlier this evening I noticed that the ‘StreetView’ selector seemed to have gone live – that is “Pegman” as Google call it, turned yellow when the map was zoomed in:

Click on Pegman and move him onto the map and georeferenced photos from Google’s Panoramio service will appear:

Panoramio photos on Google Maps in Ireland

Some of the geo-referencing is quite off, but much of it is good.  Here’s the official announcement from the Google lat/Long Blog.  Of course if you zoom out to show all of Europe, you can see the volume of georeferenced photos, but more interestingly, the areas where StreetView is currently available:

Pegman goes to Europe

Is this update a precursor for the much anticipated arrival of StreetView here in Ireland?  No word yet on that, ‘early next year’ seems to be the sufficiently vague agreed date.

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

Open for innovation?

Today, 30th March 2010, Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) launched their MapGenie service.  It looks very impressive, giving users access to OSi Raster data from Large Scale (Local maps, 1:1,000) to Small Scale (National maps, 1:2,000,000) and points in between. An overview is available on the OSi website here: http://www.osi.ie/en/news/mapgenie.aspx

This represents an excellent ehancement of OSi’s offerings to it’s large customers, who, let us not forget, make up the bulk of OSi’s revenue. Indeed, according to the OSi’s most recent annual report (2007, available here: http://www.osi.ie/en/alist/annual-reports.aspx) Utilities and Local Authorities alone made up over 50% of revenue that year.

However I will echo the blog post by ESRI Ireland (who provided some of the underlying technology for MapGenie) by stating that I feel OSi could have gone further in allowing free access to some of it’s data to the wider public.  This is what OSGB are doing for the UK – making large and some medium scale products available without any restriction on derived data.  This opening-up of OSGB data has received a lot of press particularly in The Guardian and it’s associated Free Our Data campaign. Open access to map data, even at medium and small scale, would be tremendously useful in fostering innovation in the GI sector and beyond here in Ireland.

Also in the UK an extensive consultation exercise on the future of OSGB has just concluded – Google’s Ed Parsons gives his opinion and offers an extensive list of links to the submissions of others – some very interesting reading there.

It is my opinion that these changes in the UK, and the ongoing communication with users of GI there, is being ushered along by the growing realisation within OSGB of the power, flexibility and accuracy of crowd-sourced data, OpenStreetMap in particular, allied to the increasing quality and resolution of public domain datasets such as NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.  I hope that a similar realisation takes hold within OSi and helps to bring about more open access to some of their data.

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.