GISRUK 2012 – Thursday

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Addy Pope

The second part of GoGeo’s review of GISRUK 2012 covers Thursday. If you want to find out what happened on Wednesday, please read this post. 

Thusrday saw a full programme of talks split between two parallel sessions.  I chose to go to the Landscape Visibility and Visualisation strand.

  • Steve Carver (University of Leeds) started proceedings with No High Ground: visualising Scotland’s renewable landscape using rapid viewshed assessment tools. This talk brought together new modeling software that allowed for multiple viewsheds to be analysied very quickly, with a practical and topical subject.  The SNP want Scotland to be self-sufficient with renewable energy by 2020.  An ambitious target. In 2009, 42% of Scotlands “views” were unaffected by human developments, this had declined to 28% by 2011.  Wind farms are threatening the “wildness” of Scotland and this may have implications on tourism.  Interestingly, the SNP also wants to double the income from tourism by 2020. So how can you achieve both?  By siting new wind farms in areas that do not further impact on the remaining wild areas.  This requires fast and efficient analysis of viewsheds which is what Steve and his team presented.
  • Sam Meek (University of Nottingham) was next up presenting on The influence of digital surface models choice on the visibility-based mobile geospatial application.  Sam’s research focused onan application called Zapp.  Sam is looking at how to efficiently and accuretly run visibility models on mobile devices in the field and how the results are influenced by the surface model.  In each case, all processing is done on the device. Resampling detailed DTM’s is obviously going to make processing less intensive, however this often leads to issues such as smoothing of features.  Other general issues with visibility models are stepping, where edges form in the DTM and interupt the line of sight and an over estimation of vegetation.  This research should help make navigation apps on mobiles that use visual landmarks to guide the user, more accurate and usable.
  • Possibly the strangest and most intruging paper title at GISRUK 2012 came from Neil Sang (Sweedish University of Argicultural Science) with New Horizons for the Standford Bunny – A novel method for view analysis.  The “bunny” reference was a bit of a red herring but the research did look at horizon based view analysis.  The essence was to identify horizons in a landscape to improve the speed of viewshed analysis as the horizons often persisted even when the local position changed.
  • The final paper of the session took a different direction with David Miller of The James Hutton Institute looking at Testing the publics preferences for future. This linked public policy with public consultations through the use of virtual reality environments.  The research investigated whether familiarity with the location altered the opinion of planned changes to the landscapes.  Findings showed agreement in developing amenity woodland adjacent to a village, and environmental protection, but differences arose in relation to proposals for medium-sized windfarms (note – medium-sized wind farms are defined as those that would perhaps be constructed to supply power to a farm and not commercial windfarms).

After coffee I chose to go to the Qualitative GIS session as it provided an interesting mix f papers that explored social media and enabling”the crowd”.

  • First up was Amy Fowler (Lancaster University) who asked How reliable is citized-derived scientific data?  This research looked at the prevelance of aircraft contrails using data derived through the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) Climate Survey. Given the dynamic nature of the atmosphere, it is impossible to validate user contributed data. Amy hopes to script an automated confidence calculator to analyse nearly 9,000 observations, but initial analysis suggests that observations that have accompanying photographs tend to be more reliable.
  • Iain Dillingham (City University) looked at Characterising Locality Descriptors in crowd-sourced information.  This specifically focused on humanitarian organisations. Using the wealth of data available from the 2010 Haiti earthquake they investigated the uncertainty of location from social media. They looked at georeferencing locality descriptors in MaNIS (Mammal Network Information System).  The conclusion was that while there were similarities in the datasets, the crowd-sourced data presented significant challenges with respect to vagueness, ambiguity and precision.
  • The next presentation changed the focus somewhat, Scott Orford (Cardiff University) presented his work on Mapping interview transcript records: technical, theoretical and cartographical challenges. This research formed part of the WISERD project and aimed to geo-tag interview transcripts .  Geo-tagging was done using UNLOCK but there were several issues with getting useful results out, or reducing the noise in the data.  Interview scripts were transcribed in England and complicated Welsh placename spellings often got transcribed incorrectly.  In addition, phrases such as “Erm” were quite frequent and got parsed which then had to be removed as they did not actually relate to a place. Interesting patterns did emerge about what areas appeared to be of interest to different people in different regions of Wales, however care had to be taken in preparing the dataset and parsing it.
  • Chris Parker (Loughborough University) looked at Using VGI in design for online usability: the case of access information. Chris used a number of volunteers to collect data on accessibility to public transport. The volunteers might be considered an expert group as they were all wheel-chair users.  Comparison was made between an official map and one that used the VGI data. It was found that the public perception of quality increased when VGI data was used making it an attractive and useful option for improving the confidence of online information. However, it would be interesting to look at this issue with a more mixed crowd of volunteer, rather than just the expert user group who seemed to have been commission (but not paid) to collect specific information. I am also not too sure where the term Usability from the title fits.  Trusting the source of online data may increase it use but this is not usability which refers more to the ability of users to engage with and perform tasks on an interface.

There was a good demonstration from ESRI UK of their ArcGIS.com service.  This allows users to upload their own data, theme it and display it against one of a number of background maps. The service then allows you to publish the map and restrict the access to the map by creating groups.  Users can also embed the map into a website by copying some code that is automatically created for you. All good stuff, if you want to find out more about this then have a look at the ArcGIS.com website.

Most of Friday was given over to celebrating the career of Stan Openshaw.  I didn’t work with Stan but it is clear from the presentations that he made a significant contribution to the developing field of GIS and spatial analysis and had a huge effect on the development of many of the researchers that regularly attend GISRUK.  If you want to find out more about Stan’s career, have a look at the Stan Openshaw Collection website.

Friday’s keynote was given by Tyler Mitchel who was representing the OSGeo community.    Tyler was a key force in the development of the OSGeo group and has championed the use of open software in gis.  Tyler’s presentation focused on interoprability and standards and how they combine to allow you to create a software stack that can easily meet you GIS needs.  I will try to get a copy of the slides of Tyler’s presentation and link to them from here.

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GISRUK 2012 – Wednesday

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Addy Pope

GISRUK 2012 was held in Lancaster, hosted by Lancaster University. The conference aimed to cover a broad range of subjects including Environmental Geoinformatics, Open GIS, Social GIS, Landscape Visibility and Visualisation and Remote Sensing. In addition to the traditional format, this years event celebrated the career of Stan Openshaw, a pioneer in the field of computational statistics and a driving force in the early days of GIS.

Wednesday

The conference kicked off with a Keynote from Professor Peter Atkinson of the University of Southampton.  This demonstrated the use of remotely sensed data to conduct spatial and temporal monitoring of environmental properties. Landsat data provides researchers with 40 years of data making it possible to track longer term changes. Peter gave two use case examples:

  1. River channel monitoring on the Ganges. The Ganges forms the International boundary between India and Bangladesh, understanding channel migration is extremely important for both countries.  The influece of man-made structures, such as barrages to divert water to Calcutta, can have a measurable effect on the river channel. Barrages were found to stabalise the migrating channel
  2. Monitoring regional phenology. Studying the biomass of vegetation is tricky but using “greenness” as an indicator provides a useful measure. Greenness can then be calculated for large areas, up to continent scale.  Peter gave an example where MODIS and MERIS data had been used to calculate the greenness of India. Analysis at this scale and resolution reveals patterns and regional variation such as the apparent “double greening” of the western Ganges basin which would allow farmers to have two harvests for some crops.

However, these monitoring methods are not without their challenges and limitations.  Remote sensing data provides continuous data based on a regular grid.  Ground based measurements are sparse and may not tie in, spatially or temporally, with the remotely sensed data. Ground based phenology measurements can be derived using a number of methods making it difficult to make comparisons.  A possible solution would be to adopt a crowd-sourcing technique where data is collected and submitted from enthusiasts in the field. This would certainly result in better spatial distributions of ground based measurements, but would the resulting data be reliable? Automatically calculating the greening from web-cams is currently being trialed.

The first session was then brought to a close with two talks on the use of terrestrial lidar. Andrew Bell (Queens University, Belfast) was investigating the use of terrestrial LiDAR for monitoring slopes.  DEMs were created from the scans and this was used to detect changes in slope, roughness and surface.  The project aims to create a probability map to identify surface that are likely to fail and cause a hazard to the public.  Andrew’s team will soon receive some new airbourne LiDAR data, however I feel that if this technique is to be useful to the highways agency, the LiDAR would have to mounted on a car as cost and repeatability would be two key drivers.  Andrew pointed out that this would reduce the accuracy of the data but perhaps such a reduction would be acceptable and change would still be detectable.

Neil Slatcher’s (Lancaster University) paper discussed the importance of calculating the optimum location to depoly a terrestrial scanner.  Neil’s research concentrated on lava flows which meant the landscape was rugged, some areas were inaccessible and the target was dynamic and had to be scanned in a relatively short period of time. When a target cannot be fully covered by just one scan analysis of the best positions to give complete coverage is needed.  Further, with a 10Hz scanner you could make 10 measurements per second which seems quick but a dense grid can result in scan times in excess of 3hrs.  By sub-dividing the scan into smaller scan windows that are centred over the target you can significantly reduce the size of the grid and the number of measurements required and hence the time it takes to acquire the data. This method had reduced scan times from 3 hrs to 1hr15mins.

The final session of the day had two parallel sessions, one on Mining Social Media and the other on Spatial Statistics.  Both interesting subjects but i opted to attend the Socail Media strand.

  • Lex Comber (University of Leicester) gave a presentation on Exploring the geographies in social networks.  This highlighted that there are many methods for identifying clusters or communities in social data but that the methods for understanding what a community means are still quite primitive.
  • Jonny Huck (Lancaster University) presented on Geocoding for social networking of social data.  This focused on the Royal Wedding as it was an announced event that was expected to generate traffic on social media allowing the team to plan rather than react. They found that less than 1% of tweets contained explicit location information. You could parse the tweets to extract geographic information but this introduced considerable uncertainty.  Another option was to use the location info in users profiles and assume they were at that location.  The research looked at defining levels of detail, so Lancaster Uni  Campus would be defined as Lancaster University Campus / Lancaster/Lancashire / England /UK.  By geocoding the tweets at as many levels of detail as possible you could then run analysis at the appropriate level.  What you had to be careful of was creating false hot-spots at the centroids of each country.
  • Omar Chaudhry (University of Edinburgh) explained the difficulties in Modelling Confidence in Extraction of Place Tags from Flickr.  Using a test case of Edinburgh they tried to use Flickr tags to define the dominant feature of grid cell covering central Edinburgh.  Issues arose when many photo’s were tagged for a personal event such as a wedding and efforts were made to reduce the impact of these events. Weighting the importance of the tag against the number of users who used it, rather than the absolute number of times it was used seemed to improve results. There was still the issue of tags relating to what the photo was of, rather than were it was taken.  Large features such as the Castle and Arthur’s Seat dominated the coarser grids as they are visible over a wide area.
  • Andy Turner and Nick Malleson (University of Leeds) gave a double header as they explined Applying geographical clustering methods to analyse geo-located open micro-blog posts: a case study of tweets around Leeds.  The research showed just how much information you could extract from location information in tweets, almost giving you a socio-economic profile of the people. There was some interesting discussion around the ethics of this, specifically in elation to the data protection act.  This clearly states that you can use the data for the purpose that it was collected for.  Would this research/profiling be considered what the original data had been collected for?  Probably not.  However, that was part of the research, to see what you could do and hence what companies could do if social media sites such as twitter start to allow commercial organisations to access your personal info. For more information on this look at this paper, or check out Nick’s Blog
  • One paper that was suggested as a good read on relating tweets to place and space was Tweets from Justin Bieber’s heart: the dynamics of the location field in user profiles.

I will post a summary of Thursday as soon as I can.

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UK Bio Bank

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Addy Pope

While watching the news on Friday night, yes it doesn’t get much more exciting than that these days, i saw a piece on the UK Bio Bank.  UK Biobank is a major national health resource with the aim of improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of serious and life-threatening illnesses – including cancer, heart diseases, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, eye disorders, depression and forms of dementia. UK Biobank recruited 500,000 people aged between 40-69 years in 2006-2010 from across the country to take part in this project. They have undergone measures, provided blood, urine and saliva samples for future analysis, detailed information about themselves and agreed to have their health followed.

So what is the significance of this study?  There are a a couple of important differences from previous studies, most obvious being the number of participants.  Half a million subjects is a huge, and importantly significant, sample size.  It should allow researchers to cut through background noise and discover trends that have not been apparent in smaller studies.  Another difference is that this study focuses on a diverse range of people. Some are already suffering from an illness but many are perfectly healthy.  Much of the previous research has focused on just those that are already suffering from an illness.

So why am I writing about the UK Bio Bank on a geospatial blog? Well, along with the wide array of physiological measurements that are being collected about each subject, the research team are collecting information about:

  • where participants live
  • where they grew up
  • where they have lived throughout their life
  • the income of their family while they grew up
  • their employment

and I am sure many more things.  This gives the study a spatial element and geographical factors can have a strong influence on health.  With such a large sample size GIS is the obvious tool to analyse and extract patterns from the noise of the data.  Packages such as ArcGIS and R Stats will help researchers explore the dataset.  I am sure the UK Bio Bank will become a an important research resource in years to come and will have a significant impact on epidemiology research.

UK Biobank was established by the Wellcome Trust medical charity, Medical Research Council, Department of Health, Scottish Government and the Northwest Regional Development Agency. It has also had funding from theWelsh Assembly Government and the British Heart Foundation. UK Biobank is hosted by the University of Manchester and supported by the National Health Service (NHS).

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100 years after Scott

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Addy Pope

This week marks the 100 year anniversary of Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. I would imagine that you all know who Scott was and what happened on his final attempt to reach the South Pole before Amundsen, if you need a quick refresher then take a look at the excellent article on the BGS website.

Image courtesy of The Scott Polar Research Institute - Image Ref - P2005/5/1704

To mark this anniversary i thought i would compile a list of Antarctic related geospatial resources.  Any excuse to delve back into polar science.

Data:

  • Sharegeo - there are a couple of datasets of interest on Sharegeo such as the 2012 inventory of glaciers and a Global Permafrost map.
  • World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) – compiles the annual inventory of glacier mass balance and maintains a number of other ice related datasets. Not specifically Antarctica focused, but a good global resource.
  • RAMP - Radarsat Antarctic Mapping Project (RAMP) created a high-resolution DEM of Antarctica.  DEMs are available with a 1km, 400m or 200m cell posting and are provided as ARC/INFO and binary grids. The 1Km and 400m grids are also available in ASCII format. RAMP DEM was created and is hosted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
  • GLIMS - The GLIMS glacier database is a searchable database of glacier information. GLIMS makes it easier to find out the physical attributes of glaciers around the world.
  • Community Ice Sheet Model – This project, run by the University of Montana, pulls together data that could be used to model the Antarctic ice sheet. It also supply’s code that allows you to run scenario models on the present ice sheet. Data is generally in grid (NetCDF) format.
  • NOAA - NOAA Paleoclimatology gateway provides access to ice core data for Antarctica.  Ice cores are available for a range of locations across the continent and there are some pre-processed comparissons of the asynchorny of Antarctica and Greenland.
  • ESF Research – ESF provides access to data such as global surface seawater dimethylsulfide, biological data (bacterial biomass, bacterial productivity, and UV irradiance data.

Data/Metadata Discovery Portals:

  • National Snow and Ice Data Center – NSIDC is a huge resource and i could spend hours sifting through data.  There is little point trying to list everything NSIDC hold, or make available but highlights include RAMP (see above), searchable database of glacier photos, MODIS imagery and the GLIMS glacier database.
  • Australian Antarctic Data Centre: a massive resource that contains satellite images, maps, ecology, biology and marine data.  Licence restrictions vary depending on the data type and source. In terms of getting your hands on the data itself, the best section to head to is the Data Navigator.  You need to register an account but this is free and takes 2 minutes.
    Some of the other data sources, such as the satellite data is not available to download directly from the AADC, the search facility gives you the metadata that should point you at the data custodian.  I would say that the site could usefully provide links to the data custodians but at least for satellite imagery they don’t appear to do so.
  • British Antarctic Survey (BAS) – BAS have a metadata discovery system which allows ou to explore their data spatially, temporarily and by category.  There are a few datasets in the discovery service but most are just the metadata.
  • SCAR Geoscience Map Catalogue – Jointly hosted with BAS, the SCAR Geoscience metadata catalogue provides a pretty extensive listing of maps of Antarctica.  No preview of the the sheet is provided so this is really a starting point for maps searches as you at least find out what is available, when it was created and at what scale.
  • AMRC & AWS – hosted and maintained by the University of Wisconsin - Madison, this portal contains the latest meteorological and atmospheric observations as well as a selection of satellite images of Antarctica.
  • Cool Antarctica – a fairly comprehensive source of climate data for Antarctica. This site is run by an enthusiastic ex-BAS employee

The list is not exhaustive and I will have to leave it there for this week. I will keep adding to this list, if you find any relevant resources please feel free to add a comment pointing to the resource and i will add it o the list.

 

Image generated using http://kartograph.org/showcase/projections/#stereo

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Satellites monitor impact of climate change on ecosystems

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Addy Pope

Ecology Indicators

If you are interested in ecosystems and conservation and how remote sensing can be used as a monitoring tool then you might be interested to read a paper published today in Ecological Indicators.

Tracking the effect of climate change on ecosystem functioning using protected areas: Africa as a case study hows how remote sensing has helped scientists assess the imapct of climate change on the ecosystem. Remote sensing allows you to analyse places you cannot easily access and to monitor areas much larger than you could hope to using ground based techniques.  The researchers used this to their advantage to monitor inaccessible areas that were largely untouched by human activity.  Removing the effect of humans means that changes in response to climate change should be more evident.  The study looked at 168 sites and analysed data from a 27 year period, giving this study good temporal and spatial coverage.

To find out what the study concluded follow the link below to access the current issue of Ecological Indicators, which is handily Open Access.

Tracking the effect of climate change on ecosystem functioning using protected areas: Africa as a case study – Ecological Indicators Vol 20, September 2012

 

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Europe’s cold snap visualised

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Addy Pope

You might have noticed that Europe is currently experiencing colder than normal temperatures.  Freak snow storms in southern Italy and Tripoli point at things being quite unusual.  Scores of people have died as a result of exposure with the homeless in central and Eastern Europe being particularly badly affected.

Cold Snap - courtesy of NASA

NASA have released a image showing surface temperature anomalies across Europe at the end of January.  The image has been created from multiple MODIS images and clearly shows that most of Europe has experienced surface temperatures 5-10C lower than is normal at this time of year. Only the wester fringes of the continent have escaped the freeze.

The explanation for the cold snap is an unusually pronounced wave in the jet stream.  This normally runs roughly west to east but this year there is a significant distortion which has allowed cold air to sink south over Europe.  In the UK the south has felt the effects of this with week long cold temperatures and snow in London. However, temperatures in Scotland have been just about normal.

The full article about how this image was made and what it shows can be found on the Earth Observatory site.

If you like the composite MODIS image, then you might want to read an older blog post about last winters cold snap in the UK.

 

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Whats in a name?

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Addy Pope

An interesting post that I spotted on the Strange Maps blog.   The article looks at placenames in a metropolitan (built up) environment.  Quite often, unlike in rural areas, there is no clear demarcation between different areas. So how do you know when you are one suburb or another?

Dalston

This is not Dalston

The article looks at a number of “places” in and around London.  The technique is quite simple, to walk along a main road, stopping at regular intervals to ask 10 random people “what area is this?” The results can then be plotted to see if peoples perception of place is discernible.  The technique is not hugely scientific, but then you are dealing with subjective opinions so that doesn’t matter all that much.  Similar studies have used base maps onto which people draw the boundary of a place.  In these studies care has to be taken to remove any place names that would in some way lead the respondent and bias the results of the survey.

You can read more about the Dalston survey on Euan Mills’ Blog

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The E39 from Scotland to The Faroes

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Addy Pope

Google have been getting a bit of a bad press over the last week or so as Openstreetmap accused Google of spatial vandalism.  It appears that a number of malicious edits were made to OSM from Google IP addresses.  OSM could not be sure if this was a deliberate or coordinated attack and Google has responded quickly by sacking two contractors who they believe to be responsible.

OSM is a community led mapping project which relies on contributers to add reliable and accurate information for the benefit of society.  Google has a company philosiphy of “dont be evil” but perhaps this philosophy doesnt scale when the company grows into a huge organisation or expands into emerging countries which are by their very nature ultra-competitive.

Accurate data is a must if your map is to be used and trusted.  On this note, eagle eyed @oobr spotted a data anomaly on Google.  There seems to be a road almost linking the Faroes with Orkney and Shetland.  An ambitious engineering feat but probably some years off.

Image courtesy of Google Maps 2012

 

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New NLS website – Great Britain, Ten Mile to One Inch Planning Maps series, 1944-1960

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Addy Pope

We are very lucky to have persuaded Christopher Fleet of the National Library of Scotland to write a guest blog for us……

The National Library of Scotland has just released a new website, allowing georeferenced thematic maps of Great Britain in the 1940s and 1950s to be browsed.

10 Mile Geology

The Ordnance Survey Planning Maps Series was initiated during the 1940s, aiming to form a survey of national life and resources, particularly to support the war effort and post-war reconstruction. The base maps cover Great Britainon two sheets at a scale of 1:625,000, overlaid with the British National Grid.

Farming Data

The main themes shown on the maps illustrate a broad range of natural and man-made subjects. These include Administrative Areas, Coal and Iron, Farming, Geology, Land Classification and Land Utilisation, Limestone, Local Accessibility, Population Density and Population Change, Railways, Rainfall, and Roads.

Through georeferencing, the maps can now be easily compared to modern maps, including Google maps and satellite images, through a transparency slider. Searching is also possible by a gazetteer and Grid Reference. The different thematic maps can then be viewed successively for any particular place.

The website also includes Further information about the Planning Maps series, along with a set of Explanatory Texts, published at the time to explain the compilation of the maps. These often have further details of how the thematic content was obtained and aggregated, and sometimes include additional statistical information.

 

Population Change

The OS ten mile Planning Maps series can be viewed at: http://geo.nls.uk/search/ten_mile/

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Song Map

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Addy Pope

Just a bit of Monday morning fun to get you through the January Blues.  NME have a great songmap on their blog. The map and lithographs were created by wearedorothy and are available for £20.  There is even a Spotify playlist of the songs shown in the map.

Songmap

Link to the NME Blog

Link to Wearedorothy

 

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