Ito World

ITO supports live London Tube data via Google Maps

2012-04-03T12:55:00.000+01:00

It’s an exciting day for ITO World as our latest project with Google Maps has gone live this morning. We have been working with Google for the past few months to convert live London Underground data from Transport for London (TfL) into a format suitable for use in Google Transit.

To try the feature, visit Google Maps and click the ‘Get directions’ button, select the public transit icon and search for a journey in London that uses the Underground. You will then be presented with the best route option and will be redirected onto an alternative route if there are delays, interruptions or closures on your planned journey.

Live alerts on Google Maps, with a little help from ITO!

We have been working with Google for nearly a year now. We were initially contracted to convert TfL static schedules into an appropriate format for Google Transit which we have been doing on a weekly basis since then. This latest project, however, integrates TfL’s planned engineering works feed and Tube disruptions feed into their new 'real-time' Google Transit service. Google expect millions of people to benefit from this feature during the Olympics.

Google Maps users can avoid Tube disruption using the Transit feature

All this has been made possible by TfL’s switch to Open Data over the past year which has been being championed by the Mayor of London and his team. Anyone who has been following us will know that we are firm supporters of Open Data and have worked with the Mayor’s office previously. We are particularly proud to have one of our visuals displayed on the London Data Store homepage banner!

You can read more about Google's new live service on their blog post.

New 'TIGER reviewed' map layer for ITO Map

2011-12-03T19:19:00.001Z

In response to a comment left on this blog some time back we have created a new 'tiger reviewed' map to show which roads in the USA have been checked since import using TIGER and which have not. It seems that most roads still have their 'tiger:reviewed=no' tagging, even those that have been edited in the past few years. Green is used for roads that have had their tiger=reviewed tag removed; blue is used for roads that have been edited in the past three years but which still have their tag; roads in red and orange still have their 'tiger:reviewed=no' tag and have also not been edited in the past three years. Lighter and thinner lines are used for minor roads.

US road fatality mapping available online

2011-11-22T18:57:00.004Z

Do check out our new road fatality mapping for the USA giving details of the 369,629 fatalities on US roads between 2001 and 2009. Use the 'share' features to tweet a link to the current map view, send a URL by email, embed a link to the map view in a website or even embed a slippy map in your own website of blog.*
Here is an embedded slippy map for the USA (try panning and zooming and selecting place using the search):

Here is an embedded map for downtown Los Angeles:

*You can easily embed a map for an area of interest in your own website or in Blogger. To do this first select the map view of interest, then click on the share icon and copy the text in the box below the 'embeded' heading and paste it into your website. Adjust the height and width as appropriate. It isn't yet possible to embed maps in Wordpress.com blog.

Road casualty (RTA) mapping for the USA coming later this week

2011-11-20T10:53:00.018Z

We are getting ready to launch an online map showing fatalities from Road Traffic Accidents in the USA over a 10 year period next week in advance of Thanksgiving. In the mean time here are a few screen grabs.

The first image is for Manhattan Island (New York) and shows that most fatalities are of pedestrian (dark blue background with lighter figure). The number of Cyclists (dark green background with lighter figure), motorcyclists (orange with darker figure) and vehicle occupants (purple with a darker figure) is also significant. Pedestrians are generally in their 30s-50s, motocyclists are more likely to be in the 20s and 30s. The youngest pedestrian death that I can see is of a 3 years old boy and the oldest is of a 99 man - click to view image at full size.

And here is the pattern in Washington DC where the percentage of vehicle occupants is higher; the spread of ages seems pretty wide was well.

This map shows the Silicon Valley are with a cluster of pedestrian fatalities around Stanford University and a string of vehicle fatalities on highway 101.

The overview for Washington State (Seattle is on the right) invites the user to zoom in, but even at this scale it is possibly to see how the crashes are distributed across the territory and the distribution by mode.

By contrast, this overview map showing the area around near Rapid City, South Dakota shows that nearly all the of fatalities are of motorcylists in an area that is very popular touring area motorcyclists btw:

In you want to have an idea what the service will look like when it comes then do try our UK Road Casualty mapping service.

We are keen to add details for every country that has suitable data available. If you can recommend any good sources of such data then please add a reference in a comment at the end of this blog or email us.

Road casualty mapping for GB roads

2011-11-17T13:48:00.012Z

Can you give this new road casualty mapping service a go for us? It shows road casualties for Great Britain for the period 2000 - 2010. Zoom in for more details and find a detailed explanation at the bottom of the page. We are releasing it in the run up to the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims which takes place this Sunday in many places around the UK and in many other countries.

We are likely to be getting some good coverage of it tomorrow and over the weekend and are keen to get lots of people trying it between now and then. If you have any problems or suggestions then email us at support@itoworld.com. Alternatively you might prefer use twitter (@itoworld). One can embed this mapping into websites and also into Blogger. Instructions are available on the main page itself. Try it here:

It has been developed with financial support from the Department for Transport and from the Technology Strategy Board as part of their funding of Ideas in Transit, a five year project to "promote the understanding, awareness and development of user innovations relevant to transport".

We have a version for the USA in preparation which will be ready prior to Thanksgiving Day (24th November). More soon.

ITO World at Next11 Conference

2011-06-01T12:38:00.000+01:00

This year's Next Conference was all about 'Data Love' and we were delighted to be presenting in the "Bright Data, Big City: How Data Transforms Metropolitan Life" stream.

"Visualising Big Data" was the theme for the presentation and you can see it below, click on the HD button to select a higher quality version.

New railway overlays available on ITO Map

2011-04-07T14:33:00.010+01:00

ITO World Ltd is pleased to announce the availability of four new railway overlays on ITO Map making further details contained within OpenStreetMap visible for the first time. These layers are available globally and the data for them is updated daily. The layers all have 'keys' which can be clicked to link to a page on OpenStreetMap wiki with more details about the layer and ITO Map.

The electrification overlay highlights electrified mainline railway lines in yellow, red and orange (for third-rail, contact line and unspecified electrification respectively). Blue is used for non-electrified lines. Lines where electrification is not known are shown in grey. This example show the third-rail electrified lines south of London in yellow and the contact-line electrification north of the city (click on any image to open the browser with the same view).

The railway engineering overlay highlights viaducts, bridges, embankments, cuttings and tunnels on mainline rail services (yellow, red, orange, light blue and dark blue respectively). This view of London shows all of these features.

The railway stations overlay highlights platforms. Platforms with platform numbers are in blue, those without are in red. The image below shows that Kings Cross Station and St Pancras Stations have numbered platforms and that Euston has platforms but these don't have references.

Finally, the loading gauge overlay indicates the loading gauge to which the line has been constructed which determines the size of trains that can be accommodated. In particular it indicates if shipping containers can be carried. There is virtually no data in OpenStreetMap of this type outside the East of England.

ITO will be releasing further layers in different 'themes' in due course (such as sports and landuse) and will be refining and enhancing the existing overlays. We are always happy to receive suggestions and bug reports.

ITO Map has been developed with support from 'Ideas in Transit, a five-year UK government funded research program.

ITO Map is now available globally

2011-03-30T18:59:00.005+01:00

OK, so we have installed our new servers and they are performing well so we have removed all the geographic restrictions from our new ITO Map service. This means that you can now check out waterways in Australia, schools in Berlin, electricity generation and supply in Japan or anything else that takes your fancy! We have also relaxed the zoom level restriction allowing you to zoom out to level 8 for all map overlays.

We released the services for the UK and parts of northern Europe on the 18th March and then extended to the USA and parts of Canada and the Caribbean on the 23rd March.

ITO Map has been developed with support from Ideas in Transit, a five-year UK research project following user-led information technology innovation in the transport domain with support from the UK Department for Transport and the Technology Strategy Board.

ITO Map extended to cover USA, Canada and the Caribbean

2011-03-23T19:09:00.011Z

We have just extended coverage of our ITO Map overlay map service to most of the USA and Canada and all the Caribbean islands (ie all of the USA except Hawaii and Alaska and all of Canada except the northern wilderness). Read more on the ITO Map wiki page and in the earlier announcement accompanying the release for the UK and parts of Europe.

Users of the existing European service may notice that we have reduced the maximum zoom level for 8 to 10 for some scripts and increased it from 11 to 10 for some others. Further expansion of the service will come by the end of next week.

This first screenshot highlights lakes, rivers and ferry routes in British Columbia (lakes in light blue, rivers in dark blue, coastline in green, canals using tan and ferries in read). Click on any of these screenshots to open the browser for the given views. Keys are provided for all overlays in the bottom left corner of the map. Clicking on the key takes one to further details on the OSM wiki.

This next view is of railways in New York (Mainline services are in black, underground rail in red and light rail in blue).

This next one is for speed limits in Seattle (lowest speeds are green, higher speeds in purple and blue). Full details in the key.

And finally electricity distribution around Baltimore with sub stations in red, power distribution in various colours according to voltage and black where no voltage is specified.

ITO Map - A new map overlay service for OpenStreetMap

2011-03-18T18:10:00.032Z

ITO are pleased to announce ITO Map, a set of new overlay maps for OpenStreetMap that highlight data layers within OSM which are invisible using the standard map views; these include speed limits, highway lane widths, whether rivers are navigable and electricity distribution. The overlays available using this service are described in more detail on the ITO Map wiki page.

For the first few days we are providing the service for two areas, the first includes the UK, northern France, Holland, eastern Germany up to southern Norway; a separate area coveering the bay area around San Francisco is also included. We will roll out the service to more areas over the coming days with the intention of going global within a few weeks. All overlays have keys available at the bottom left and in addition these keys link to the wiki page for further details when clicked (or 'right clicked').

Here are examples from some of the 22 map views that are currently available. This first one shows water features around Bay Area in California. The colours are chosen to make a clear distinction between different feature types (rivers and streams are blue, canals are tan, lakes turquoise, reservoirs purple and the coast in green).

And this one shows the number of lanes for highways around Utrecht in Holland (dual 2 lane carriageways are shown in green, 3 lanes in blue, four lanes in purple and 6 lanes in yellow).

And road speed limits for major roads in the United Kingdom (70mph in dark blue, 60mph in light blue, 50mph in violet, 40mph in red and 30mph in orange).

Former railways in north Wales (green for heritage lines, red for disused lines where the tracks still in place, blue for dismantled where the alignment is still in tact but the tracks have been lifted and violet for where there is no remaining evidence of the route).

Electricity distribution in northern France and surrounding countries (dark blue for 400KV, purple for 320KV, orange for other high tension voltage and thin green lines for low voltage minor lines). Power generation plant and substations/transformers are also shown.

And finally some amazing 'micro-mapping' for Cambourne, Cambridgeshire detailing all the fences, hedges and walls in town (green for hedges, brown for fences and red for walls). I think this is a great example of how OpenStreetMap is going way beyond the place where commercial mapping stops.

The tiles will initially be based on daily diff planet data (which will normally be updated daily with a 24 hour processing lag). The service is likely to be slower after about 04:00 hours UTC when the new data is loaded. We are in the process of adding server capacity to improve performance further and allow a global release but wanted to get the service available for at least part of the world immediately. In the short term if the service is too slow then please give it a break for a hour or so and before trying again. The overlays can only display linear and area features at this stage, we will add the ability to handle nodes in due course. In time we will include overlays from other data sources as well as OpenStreetMap, hence the name 'ITO Map' rather than somthing which included OpenStreetMp or OSM in the title.

Do add comments and suggestions to the wiki page. We will gather feedback over the next week and iron out any wrinkles.

Some graphs relating to OpenStreetMap GB road name completeness

2011-01-26T06:49:00.011Z

Here are some graphs derived from our service that compares road names in OpenStreetMap with those in the Ordnance Survey's OS Locator product.

This first graph shows how many road names are missing from OpenStreetMap that are in OS Locator with the 408 districts/boroughs organised with the ones with the least missing on the left and the most missing on the right. Do be aware that the size of authorities varies very considerably from the Isles of Scilly with 57 roads to Leeds with 12,000! Clearly there are a small number of larger places with where a lot of work is required.

This next graph shows the percentage completeness of these same authorities. The colour bars match with the thematic map. Nearly half the authorities now have 75% completeness and do be aware that many of the missing road names are likely to be for very minor rural roads/tracks or for small cul-de-sacs in town. As such an authorities with 75% completeness is likely to be very usable for most purposes.

This final graph shows all the 253,000 road names in OS Locator that are currently missing from OpenStreetMap as a cumulative version of the first graph. The most complete authorities are again on the left. It shows that one could complete the 'best' 204 authorities by adding 50,000 roads but to complete the others would need a further 200,000 roads with is a lot of work to do manually.

Personally, I am starting to think about a bot that could add a lot of these roads automatically for the less well covered areas using OS VectorMap District an OS Locator. The bot would do what it was sure about for an area as instructed by a mapper who would then do a cleanup job of the area afterwards.

OpenStreetMap GB - a progress report!

2011-01-20T14:21:00.018Z

Back in May 2010 ITO World Ltd announced a new online service that compared road names in OpenStreetMap with names released as Open Data by the Ordnance Survey in their OS Locator product in April 2010. We then launched an analysis service which provided statistics for each district/borough in July 2010.

We are now pleased to be able to announce an upgrade to this service which includes a useful thematic map view showing the level of completeness (at the road level) for every district/borough in Great Britain (compared to OS Locator). Here is the overview. Red equals 0-50%, orange 50-75%, yellow 75-95% and blue 95-100%. It is a slippery map and one can zoom into any part of the country.

The district summary report indicates that there are currenrtly 34 districts have greater than 95% road completeness and 171 have over 75% of the roads included (out of a total of 408 districts/boroughs).

As well as thematic view there is still the 'roads missing' view which has been enhanced with administrative boundaries (the thin red lines). The prominence of 'minor errors' as been reduced by always showing them in grey (minor errors are where the only disagreement is in the use of apostrophes - ie Kings Street and King's Street etc).

This information is also available in the main Potlatch editor (use the new Potlatch 2 version to immediate access to the layer).

We have also introduced a page for each district detailing the road missing from OpenStreetMap and also any possible errors in the OS Locator. This page is useful both for mappers wishing to improve the data in their areas and also to authorities wishing to assess the usefulness of OpenStreetMap within their territory. This image shows the page for Cambridge.

This report indicates that in Cambridge there are a total of 66 roads in OS Locator that are missing from OSM and also a total of 7 possible major errors and 4 minor errors in OS Locator itself. We do not currently identify roads that are in OpenStreetMap but which are missing from OS Locator which might also be useful to the OS. Personally I think this looks like 'Big Society' in action!

Here are the possible major errors in OS Locator:
Basset Close should be "Bassett Close"
Chesnut Grove should be "Chestnut Grove"
Kathleen Elliot Way should be "Kathleen Elliott Way"
J J Thompson Avenue should be "J J Thomson Avenue"
Malletts Road should be "Mallets Road"
Northfields Avenue should be "Northfield Avenue"
Winderemere Close should be "Windermere Close"

And the minor errors:
Coldham's Lane should be "Coldhams Lane"
Coldham's Grove should be "Coldhams Grove"
Friar's Close should be "Friars Close"
Parson's Court should be "Parsons Court"

Overall OpenStreetMap now includes 588,000 names roads that match with names in OS Locator (out of a total of 838,000) and of these 140,000 have been added since 1 April 2010 when OS Locator was released. Of course OpenStreetMap is much more than just a road map and has a huge amount of additional detail that is not available from the OS.

For the avoidance of doubt the Ordnance Survey will validate any claims independently for their own reassurance and also to avoid any licensing issues with the OSM CCBYSA and ODBL licenses used by OSM.

For the purposes of this analysis we are using the OS Boundary Line data for districts/boroughs directly to ensure that we have 100% accurate coverage (boundaries are not fully represented in OSM directly yet).

This product has been developed with financial support from the Department of Transport and from the Technology Strategy Board as part of their funding of Ideas in Transit, a five year project to "promote the understanding, awareness and development of user innovations relevant to transport". ITO World Ltd, the Ordnance Survey, the University and the West of England and the University of Loughborough make up the project team.

From the BBC and Wired Magazine to Your Wall

2010-12-17T13:43:00.001Z

ITO on BBC4's 'Joy of Stats' from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

A busy few months, fresh from *two* spreads in Wired magazine, we made a cameo appearance in the BBC's 'Joy of Stats' documentary, presented by none other than Hans Rosling.

After countless email enquiries and full of Christmas spirit, we decided to make Hal's glorious visuals easily available to the public, with our very own art gallery.

The gallery lives at www.whitewall.com/itoworld and from there you can choose an image, customise it to the size and format you want, and order a print. The quality is excellent and you can even order canvases, wooden frames, lightboxes... (there is a "Configure Product" button on the bottom left when you click through).

We have the classic 'OSM: Year of Edits'

The beautiful London Bus Network

The ethereal Marine Traffic

And individual Year of Edits cities, like Milan

I have a couple of 1 metre prints on my walls and they look fabulous!

Minor Updates to NaPTAN System

2010-07-26T10:02:00.002+01:00

There have been a few minor updates to the NaPTAN system. First we have re-ordered the warnings to make the manual warnings more prominent. This will help users discover and rectify manual warnings in their area. We have also made the ATCO Code and Nat Gaz ID more prominent on the feature pages to help when comparing NaPTAN with other systems.

New OpenStreetMap Analysis service launched

2010-07-23T10:44:00.009+01:00

ITO have released a new OSM Analysis service that gives an overview of OpenStreetMap completeness for Great Britain when compared to the Ordnance Survey's OS Locator product.

The results can be viewed both on a map and as a summary report; the map highlights discrepancies between the sources and the summary gives headline figures for each of the 400+ district/boroughs in Great Britain. The summary reports use OS Boundary-Line.

The service will be useful both to volunteer mappers who wish to improve the OpenStreetMap in their area and also to end-users who wish to know how good the data is for a particular area.

Here is the map view:

And here is part of the summary report which can be sorted in various ways.

If errors are found in the Ordnance Survey's data by a mapper, which do sometimes occur, then the special 'not:name' field in OpenStreetMap can be used to report this and the discrepancy will no longer appear in the above reports and mapping.

Information in the 'not:name' field can also be used by the Ordnance Survey to help them improve their data quality by giving them an addition source of possible errors to check.

This service has been developed by ITO with support from Ideas in Transit which is a 5 year research project funded by the UK Government in which both ITO and the Ordnance Survey are partners.

This service would not have been possibly prior to the release of the Ordnance Survey datasets as open data in April 2010.

Free registration is required for access to the mapping view.

OS Locator validation mapping for UK OpenStreetMap data

2010-05-31T10:10:00.009+01:00

ITO have produced a mapping layer which can be used within OpenStreetMap editors to check for differences between OpenStreetMap data and Ordnance Survey Locator (which has been released as Open Data).

Within the OpenStreetMap editor the new layer appears as a series of boxes with associated names for all streets that are in OS Locator but which are not in OSM within the same bounding box with a small buffer area added.

Normally a box in this layer indicates an error or omission in OSM, however there are also some errors in the OS data. The not:name can be added to the OSM data in these situations and the box will not appear in subsequent analyses and there is less risk that someone transcribing incorrect OS data into OSM at a later date.

An example of an error in OS Locator is the mispelling of Arthur's Terrace in Ipswich has been entered as 'Athurs Terrace'. I have added a tag 'not:name=Athurs Terrace' to the street and it now on longer shows on the analysis.

How many errors are there in OS Locator? I have been through data for Ipswich and have found 7 errors where OS Locator data does not match the relevant street sign. I have added not:name tags to all of these, follow the links to see how they work. It is also useful to add a 'note' field with a description of why the not:name tag has been added.

In addition to the above I am investigating a number of other potential errors at present which will probably add another 5 or so errors to the list creating a total of 12 out of some 3000 named road names in the town meaning that OS Locator is 99.7% accurate which isn't bad. This test does not of course show the streets which are in OSM but missing from OS but that is a separate test for another day and OSM should perform pretty well on that one.

To access the above mapping from Potlatch add the following string of text into the 'custom' layer box.

http://tiles.itoworld.com/os_locator/!/!/!.png

As a technique I would recommend doing a first pass getting rid of the bigger and the less complicated boxes and then do a second pass on the remaining smaller ones as it can be difficult to make sense of multiple overlapping boxes in one pass.

The analysis is current run each night based on the Geofabrik GB data published earlier the same day so changes to OSM will show up in the map rendering not the next day but the day after that. You may therefor choose to do a pass across an area one day and then do a second pass a couple of days later.

Also, do note that the OS bounding boxes seem to have a small rounding error resulting in edges of the bounding box that do not always exactly match the end of the relevant street.

'Airspace rebooted' animation hits 500,000 viewings

2010-05-01T10:59:00.016+01:00

Only a week after ITO World Ltd published an animation showing flight movements over Europe in the period after the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull the online plays have hit 500,000. We have had mentions in the online versions of the Economist, the Guardian and the Huffington Post and it was shown on Canada's Discovery television channel.

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

The animation is based on information collected by volunteers of the FlightRadar24 project who use VHF receivers to gather data from transmission from commercial planes. The base mapping is from OpenStreetMap.

On 17 April 2010 there were virtually no flights:

By 18 April 2010 there were a few more:

By 19 April 2010 there were more flights over mainland Europe but still none from United Kingdom airports:

From 20 April 2010 flights were pretty much back to normal (note that there is still no data for much of France and for some other parts of Europe).

As well as our original animation which we released using a creative commons share -alike license there is now a version set to music and one with an ash cloud overlay.

ITO World are experts at transport data presentation and Open Data. We have produced an animation for Sir Tim Berners Lee which he showed at TED of edits to OpenStreetMap during 2009 and our 'OSM 2008: A Year of Edits' animation has been viewed 145,000 times online and shown at numerous conferences.

ITO have also been documenting the creative ways people used social media to get home after the flight disruptions as part of Ideas in Transit.

Metric Downloads and Test Adjustments

2010-04-27T09:25:00.003+01:00

ITO has released a new version of the NaPTAN Management service which provides a number of new features.

Metric Downloads
There is a now a new Metrics Download Page where users can download in CSV format a number of different Metrics. It is possible to download counts of live, suppressed or resolved warnings for any scope for any date to get a snapshot of where the system was at any point. The system can also provide trend information to monitor warning types over a given period and establish how the system is performing over time.

New Tests and Test Adjustments
A new test has been added called "Stop Indicator Not Preferred". This tests whether the Stop Indicator is one of the new preferred list of indicators that should be used. Other tests have also been tightened to help keep the NaPTAN dataset continually improving.

A number of other minor features and bug fixes have been added to help improve the service.

BBC Interview: Ordnance Survey and Transport Open Data

2010-04-06T15:32:00.003+01:00

As Making Public Data Public gathers momentum in government, the focus is now moving to the need for open transport data in the UK. I was interviewed by the BBC about the Ordnance Survey open data release and took the opportunity to talk about "the missing link", that is transport schedule data.

It starts about 30 seconds in:

Download BBC Pods and Blogs post
Follow @radioproducer the intrepid BBC broadcaster

TED, Tim Berners-Lee & ITO - The Video

2010-03-31T17:15:00.000+01:00

Its taken a little while for us to publish this, but I'm sure you will agree it was worth the wait. Here is Tim Berners-Lee showing off some of our visualisation magic at this year's TED conference in "The Year Open Data Went Worldwide":

Now that's story telling with data.

OSM Mapper Is Receiving Some TLC

2010-03-30T16:34:00.001+01:00

As some of you have noticed, OSM Mapper isn't updating right now. Why you may ask? Well the OSM planet file was broken for a week, which is essential so we couldn't do much about that, and take a look at this:

Thanks to the growth of the OSM community, the data is growing exponentially. We are amazed and delighted by this growth, but it does give us some development challenges with our global OSM model. We've taken the down-time as an opportunity to take a look at how we process OSM data.

Fear not, Hal is working on our new and improved global OSM model. We'll let you know when the new model is in operation and OSM Mapper is updating again.

Posted via email from Christopher's posterous

London Datastore - Hold The Front Page

2010-02-15T16:38:00.001Z

Some Itonians are proud Londoners, so it brings a big smile to our faces to see our work on the front page of the London Datastore:

Want to make something useful with London's data? Head over to data.london.gov.uk

ITO World at TED 2010 - Project Haiti

2010-02-12T18:23:00.004Z

We are proud to announce that our work has been displayed at this year's TED conference, where the world's greatest thinkers and doers come together. We were asked to provide visualisations that helped tell the story of open data in 2009, for Sir Tim Berners-Lee to give an update on open data since his talk last year.

We chose to tell the story of 'OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti'.

We all followed the crisis that unfolded following the Haiti earthquake, many of us chose to donate money, a few were flown out and deployed as part of the relief effort. But what practical impact can many have without being there in Haiti itself? Well, during this crisis a remarkable story unfolded; of how people around the world could virtually collaborate and contribute to the on-the-ground operations.

With the little existing physical, political and social infrastructure now destroyed or damaged, the situation was especially challenging for aid agencies arriving on the ground. Where are the areas most in need of assistance, how do we get there, where are people trapped under buildings, which roads are blocked? This information is important to the rescue agencies immediately after the event, and to the longer rebuilding process. In many developing countries, there is a lack of good mapping data and particularly after a crisis, when up-to-date information is critical to managing events as they evolve.

Enter OpenStreetMap, the wiki map of the world, CrisisMappers and an impromptu community of volunteers who collaborated to produce the most authoritative map of Haiti in existence. Within hours of the event people were adding detail to the map, but on January 14th high resolution sattelite imagery of Haiti was made freely available and the Crisis Mapping community were able to trace roads, damaged buildings, and enter camps of displaced people into OpenStreetMap. This is the story of OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti:

OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo. Supported by Ideas In Transit

Each flash represents a new edit into OpenStreetMap, and this visualisation is a vivid picture of how much work was contributed by volunteers, following the quake. First the primary and secondary roads (green and red) are added and then smaller residential streets and many other features such as the blue glowing camps of displaced people that emerge.

Its not all about OpenStreetMap however, a variety of organisations provided technical solutions with vital services, such as Ushahidi - a service where anyone in Haiti can send an SMS message with their location and report an emergency or need. All this information is then aggregated and publicly displayed in near real-time, on a platform that almost anyone can use.

With all the talk of open data and the launch of Data.gov.uk, its very easy for us to get excited about the release of huge tranches of government data, but means little to anyone else. We now have the potential for many new services that will bring tangible benefits, in this case for the crisis management of the Haiti Earthquake. After the crisis, thousands of people from all over the world were able to contribute and build what is now the most complete map of Haiti - in use on the ground by the United Nations, Ushahidi, and the default map of choice for NGOs. This picture says it all:

OpenStreetMap being used on a GPS unit for search and rescue in Haiti by Fairfax County Urban Search & Rescue Team

What does all this have to do with ITO World and transport? Well, we want to visualise and tell the story of transport - how does the network function, what is the story of your commute, how will this planning decision affect transport in my city? We are working on powerful analytical tools that will visualise the current status, and future scenarios of transport networks enabling us to make better decisions. By creating a narrative around transport, people can understand how and why decisions are being made, and collaborate to build a better transport system that meets their needs.

Something's Brewing in the Ito Labs

2010-02-01T13:38:00.001Z

Posted via email from Christopher's posterous

Video - Storytelling with Visualisation at the Data.gov.uk Launch

2010-01-25T12:00:00.002Z

We whipped up a storm at the Data.gov.uk launch, demoing our Local Transport Posters and storytelling with visualisation.

See the video here:

Data.gov.uk Launch from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

I would like to point out that I don't usually scratch my nose so much, but sharing a stage with Sir Tim Berners-Lee is rather nerve-wracking!

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