Planet GeoSpatial

London Tube Strike Mapped

Keir Clarke — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:14:00 +0000

London Tube Strike Map

Workers on the London Underground system are currently on a 24 hour strike, causing disruption to the journeys of London's commuters. The BBC are using the Ushahidi incident reporting system to provide a Google Map of the disruption caused by the strike.

Londoners can use the map to report which stations and tube lines are currently experiencing delays. It is possible to report a disruption by sending an email to londontravel@bbc.co.uk, by sending a tweet with the hashtag '#TubeStrike' or by completing a short form.

As with all crowd-sourced systems this map is reliant on user input and, to be honest, at the moment the map looks a little empty. It probably isn't the best source to find out if your journey is likely to be disrupted by the strike. It is nice however to see Ushahidi being used by the BBC.

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Kashgar panoramas and another apology

stefan.geens@gmail.com — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 19:02:51 +0000

I'll be off the internet again for a week (this time traveling in Indonesia) so preëmptive apologies for the lack of updates, but before I'm off: I managed to get the first two panoramas done from Kashgar. Here's my favorite spot in Kashgar:

Tea house and evening market, Kashgar in Xinjiang

(It was used as a backdrop for The Kite Runner -- that movie was shot in Kashgar, BTW.)

And here's a panorama taken from inside another tea house. I've got more updates planned for as soon as I'm back.

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The Urban Metabolism of Singapore to be Studied

Matt Ball — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:44:52 +0000

Urban metabolism is a new discipline which was developed in the environment school at Yale University to track how energy and materials flow through an environment. The Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the National University of Singapore (NUS) have begun a three-year, $400,000, research study to monitor the efficiency of buildings in [...]

Google Maps Mania Map of the Week

Keir Clarke — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:09:00 +0000

CommonSpace
If you live in Philadelphia you should definitely let CommonSpace try to find you a great night out for you and your friends. CommonSpace lets you add multiple starting points to a Google Map and then finds things to do in areas that are convenient to you and your friends.

To start planning your night out just enter your name, a Philadelphia address, the length of time you are prepared to travel for and your mode of transport. CommonSpace will then show you the area within which you can travel in that time.

A slide control at the bottom of the map allows you to adjust your travelling time and expands or contracts the shaded area on the map accordingly. If you are planning to meet up with friends you can now add their names and addresses to the map. As you add your friends to the map their travel areas are also shaded on the map. Most importantly the area that can be reached by you and your friends is highlighted to show where you can all meet.

Now that you have determined where you are all going to meet you need to find a venue. In the map sidebar you can choose to search for events and venues from Yelp!, SBN, Philly Live Arts, Uwishunu and the Phillyfun Guide. You can choose from a large number of different categories including bars, restaurants, arts and theatres etc. You can also choose the date and time of events.

When you have selected a date, time and the kind of events / venues that you are interested in the results for your selected area of search are displayed on the map.

You can now browse the selections chosen for you by CommonSpace. When you find an event or venue you wish to visit you can add it to your 'Plan'. You can add as many events as you like to you Plan and when you have finished you can get directions and a link to share your itinerary with all your friends.

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Transportation Costs on Google Maps

Keir Clarke — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Abogo

Abogo can help you discover the average transportation costs for different addresses. You can use Abogo to discover the costs of where you live now, or where you would like to live. Abogo measures the money an average household in a neighborhood would spend getting around, including car ownership, car use, and transit use.

To check a neighborhood's transportation costs with Abogo you just need to search for an address. Abogo then shows the address on a Google Map. A map marker (in the shape of a house) is placed over the address. If you click on the marker you can view the estimated monthly transportation cost at that address.

It is easy to compare the cost of your transportation to other areas as Abogo overlays a heat map on your results. You can therefore tell at a glance how your transportation costs compare to those living in other neighborhoods.

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Christchurch Earthquake Visualizations

Google Earth Blog — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:32:25 +0000

By now you've likely heard about the earthquake that struck Christchurch, New Zealand over the weekend. While there have been no deaths reported, the magnitude 7.1 earthquake has caused quite a lot of damage.

GEB reader Kelvin sent us a file that is a great visualization of the quakes, with data from the GNS Science and their GeoNet website.

You can view the data by simply downloading this KMZ file and then clicking the [play] button in the upper-left corner. If you find any other Google Earth resources related to the New Zealand earthquake, please let a comment and let us know.

New Fleet Utilization Report is VERY POWERFUL

rdonat — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:47:49 +0000

We added a new report called the “Fleet Utilization Report” last week.

This allows you to view the following for up to a month for your fleet:

Miles
Hours driven
Trips
Days of use

Now you can easily see in seconds (or less than a second, realistically):

Which vehicles are being over-used
Which vehicles are being under-used
How many miles/Trips/Hours/Days of use per month

Here is how you run it under Reports->Activity->Fleet Use:

Running the new Fleet Utilization Report

Here is what the summary looks like (without the “daily” option checked):

GPS Insight Fleet Utilization Report

If you want to see a “matrix” of vehicle utilization by day, you can click the “daily” box, and see 4 distinct matrices — one for each of the 4 categories of utilization, and columns for each day chosen:

GPS Insight Fleet Utilization Report (daily option)

It is important to note that we have run this report for fleets of 1000 vehicles for an entire month, in less than 30 seconds.

Most competitors’ reports time out and fail when you try to run this much data at once. This is around 2.5 million miles worth of data for 1000 trucks for a month, in around 25 seconds, which amounts to 100,000 miles per second which we can process for you and your company.

And this report is just one of the 35 or so we offer.

Enjoy!

Thanks,

Rob.

How to not forget things and get in trouble with your wife…

rdonat — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 21:34:19 +0000

I was working yesterday (and today) and my wife sent me an email to pick some stuff up from the grocery store.

Email asking me to get things from the store

I knew I would forget & get home, & have to drive back, so here’s what I did:

Send myself a reminder to go to the store via Garmin Message to my car

Here’s what I sent only 2 minutes after getting the email:

Modern day GPS Insight "ribbon tied on my finger"

This means when I get in my car, the Garmin will be beeping at me, with this message, and I won’t get home and forget.

Here’s what the Garmin screens looked like:

I have a message waiting for me

Click on it for the full message

Full message to remind me to go to the store

And did I remember?

Yep, and I can pull up a stop report to show it:

Run a stop report for "Rob" vehicle for yesterday

Note the 24 minute stop near the grocery store:

24 minute stop at the store to get groceries

Why did it take me 24 minutes to get 7 things?

Because I need GPS in a supermarket — I made 5 trips from aisle 1 to aisle 20 — I have no idea where anything is & am worthless in a grocery store.

That would be a very useful product for guys like me.

Rob.

Timeline of the Christchurch Earthquake

Keir Clarke — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 12:49:00 +0000

Mapping Quakes in Canterbury

New Zealand's Sciblogs has used Google Maps to create a storyboard of seismic activity for the Christchurch earthquake and its aftershocks. The data for the maps comes from New Zealand's GeoNet data portal.

Each map represents one hour. The circles on the maps represent seismic events and the larger the circle, the higher the quake’s magnitude. A reader of the blog has also uploaded images of the maps to Picasa to create an animation of the earthquake and its aftershocks.

GeoNet has created its own map of the Christchurch earthquake that shows instrument recordings of the earthquake and felt reports submitted by the public from different localities around New Zealand.

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How Global is your Social Network?

Keir Clarke — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 10:28:00 +0000

Twittermap.tv

How global is your social circle? Using twittermap.tv you can get the answer to this question by visualising the locations of your Twitter followers on a Google Map.

And this is only one of the features of twittermap.tv.

To see where your followers are on a Google Map you just need to enter your Twitter user name. Your location is then shown on the map with a map marker. Your followers are displayed on the map using their profile pictures.

As well as visualising the locations of your followers you can view all the tweets sent from different locations. For example, you can view all the tweets sent from New York. You can also use twittermap.tv to find all the Twitter users at a location.

Finally, you can search twittermap.tv for all tweets about a specific term. The tweets about that subject are then shown on the map and in the map sidebar. A really nice touch in this visualisation of tweets is that if one of the tweets is in reply to another user a polyline is drawn between the two users.

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