Archive for the 'Software' category

Surname Diversity in Great Britain

Aug 20 2010 Published by James under Featured Maps, Software, Surnames, Visualisation

As part of my PhD research I recently produced the map below (high res. version) that shows the diversity of surnames in Great Britain. I wanted to demonstrate that surname diversity is not uniform across Great Britain. For example towns and cities (especially London) have relatively high surname diversities compared with rural areas because more migrants and single people live in them. Wales has a very low surname diversity due to its past naming conventions. The measure used is calculated by dividing the number of surnames by the total population of each Output Area (OA). There are over 200,000 OAs in Britain. Urban OAs are very small despite accounting for a large proportion of the total population, so I have scaled the size of each OA by their population (the map is therefore a cartogram). This creates the somewhat bloated appearance of Great Britain, but serves to emphasise the increased surname diversity (due to more single people and migrants) in towns and cities. The correct shape of Great Britain is shown in the inset. For more technical info please see below.

To create this map I used ArcGIS 10 and the Cartogram Geoprocessing Tool. The nice thing about the tool is that it is not dependent on VBA and therefore worked straight off in ArcGIS 10. There are over 220,000 spatial units in this map and the tool had no problems processing them. I have not found any alternatives that work for this volume of data.

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Automated Cartography: The urban expansion of Lansing

Aug 03 2010 Published by James under Resources, Software, Visualisation

I hadn’t seen this video before. It demonstrates one of the earliest attempts at automated cartography for the display of temporal spatial data. The video shows the urban growth of Lansing at 5 yearly intervals from between 1850 and 1965 and was produced by Allan Schmidt at the Michigan State University Urban Regional Research Institute. The visualisation was produced with the synergraphic mapping system (SYMAP) developed by Howard Fisher in the mid 1960s. More details and a fully downloadable version can be found here. A presentation on SYMAP is available here. The sequence starts with a slow version of two minutes forty-five seconds before repeating the sequence more rapidly in forty-five seconds, and finally in five seconds.

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ArcGIS for iPhone: Review

Jul 19 2010 Published by James under ESRI, Resources, Software

ESRI have just launched their ArcGIS for iPhone Application. I have tested it out and thought I would share a my first impressions. I conducted the test on my iPhone 3GS running software version 4.0.1 and with 1 to 3 bars of 3G signal.

Overall I found the app to be very impressive. You are greeted with a world map that you can instantly interact with by panning and zooming in the usual way.

The map tiles loaded surprisingly quickly- it took approx 5 seconds to zoom from the above view to building level with only 1 bar of signal.

Users can search for places of interest…

…but this provided the only disappointment with the map appearing to lack the required data.

Zooming out a little resolved this problem, but I am not sure how many people would think to do this. I suspect the problem is relatively easily  addressed and may well be in future updates. Offering standard maps is not particularly innovative and not what the app sets out to achieve. The real innovation is the ability to view layers available from the ArcGIS.com website. You can, for example, use OpenStreetMap as the base map

or overlay additional information, in this case the Gulf Oil Spill Forecast:

Navigation to layers is straightforward:

I especially like the fact that users can add their own servers and also bookmark their favourite layers. On top of these features users can measure distances and calculate areas.

I found these tools to be extremely intuitive and I expect they will become an integral part to many field based introductory GIS courses. In a recent talk I attended, Jack Dangermond said that GIS software in the past was made to be complicated. With this application ESRI have demonstrated that GIS can be made to be easy. I think all who use this app both from within and beyond GIS with be genuinely impressed.

**I have just discovered a more in depth review worth reading from James Fee’s GIS blog.**

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Top 60 Chinese Cities

Jun 07 2010 Published by James under Resources, Software, Visualisation

60 Cities with more than 1 Million inhabitants

Cities are one of the many phenomena that follow a long-tailed distribution. In simple terms there are a few big cities and lots of small ones. The classic way of showing a long tailed distribution (and the method from which the name is taken) is to produce as plot such as that below:

The infographic at the top of the post by chinfographics.com demonstrates the distribution in a more engaging and constructive way.

One method I have used in the past to demonstrate data with a long tailed distribution is the excellent Wordle tool. I have created a Wordle (below) for the same data (downloaded from Chinfographics). Whilst it does not compete with the Chinfographics infographic in terms of quality,  I still think Wordles provide a very simple, and effective, method of displaying data with a “long tail”.

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Graduate Jobs with ESRI (UK)

Apr 26 2010 Published by James under ESRI, Jobs, Software

ESRI (UK) have a couple of graduate vacancies with their Technical Solutions Group (TSG) for the following roles:

GIS Developer:

Reporting to the TSG Technology Manager, the role of the GIS Developer is to support the sales process through the development of bespoke demonstration applications, and to work with Customers and Business Partner organisations to provide  technical advice and guidance. The role requires the individual to be both analytical and Customer facing, therefore experience of working in a Customer facing environment and confidence at presenting to an audience is essential. Ideally the individual will be educated to degree level or above in a Computer Science, Software Engineering or an IT related subject

Ideally the individual will be educated to degree level or above in GIS or an IT related subject.

This role would suit a graduate with at least 1 years post graduate experience.

If you are interested in exploring the above opportunity in more depth, please email (preferably) or write to us, enclosing your CV and details of your availability (both for interview and for job commencement, if successful) and your current and expected salary.

GIS Consultant

Reporting to the TSG Industry Manager, the GIS Consultant is responsible for providing Technical Input (including demonstrations and presentations) to support Customer meetings and other sales / marketing activities. The role requires the individual to be both analytical and Customer facing, therefore experience of working in a Customer facing environment and confidence at presenting to an audience is essential.

Ideally the individual will be educated to degree level or above in GIS or an IT related subject.

This role would suit a graduate with at least 1 years post graduate experience.

If you are interested in exploring the above opportunity in more depth, please email (preferably) or write to us, enclosing your CV and details of your availability (both for interview and for job commencement, if successful) and your current and expected salary.

Applications should be marked ‘Private and confidential’ and submitted to:

HR Department (Email:hrteam@esriuk.com)

ESRI (UK) Ltd, Millennium House, 65 Walton Street, Aylesbury HP21 7QG
Telephone: 01296 745 500

Closing date: 7th May 2010

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Jack Dangermond at Where 2.0: GIS on the Web–A Big Step

Apr 03 2010 Published by James under ESRI, Software

I have embedded below Jack Dangermond’s recent talk at Where 2.0. It introduces the exciting opportunities provided by what Dangermond calls “GIS in the Sky”. Thanks to Alex Singleton for sending me the link to the video posted on GIS and Science.

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Mapping and Colour blindness

Mar 10 2010 Published by James under Resources, Software, Visualisation

The explosion in spatial data availability and dissemination through online visualisation has produced many interesting maps. A friend of mine, however, recently commented that not enough is done for those with colour blindess.  To see the impact of this I was recommended a great website developed by Stanford University that enables users to check  how clear their images are to colour blind people. I have run this test for a number of maps below.  The top three maps are amongst the most popular maps on CASA’s Maptube Website whilst the fourth map is one of my own. The top two are have undergone the test for Deuteranope colour blindness and the bottom two for Protanope colour blindness.


I was amazed at how indistinguishable seemingly contrasting colours can be. The final map fares best and I think this is because it is simply differing shades of the same colour. If I am honest colour blindness is not something I have seriously considered in my own maps until now so I cannot claim to be a good example. From now on, however, I intend to make a real effort in colour selection for my maps. You can’t go far wrong with the Colorbrewer palettes so I will make the effort to use these as much as possible in the future.

Thanks to Jess Wardlaw for telling me about Vischeck.

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Free GIS Resources

Jan 26 2010 Published by James under Book Review, Journals, Resources, Software

Over the last couple of days I have utilised some excellent free GIS resources. I have listed these and some others below.

Geospatial Analysis: This is the free online version of de Smith, Longley and Goodchild’s excellent book by the same title. It provides full coverage of current GIS methodologies. It also provides extensive information regarding the various GIS software available.

Analysing Spatial Point Patterns in R: 200 pages of workshop notes written by Adrian Baddeley. These provide extremely detailed and comprehensive overview of the spatstat in R.

GeoDa Center Tutorials: A range of tutorial material provided by creators of the GeoDa Software. I would focus on the R tutorials as the GeoDa tutorials are awaiting an update in line with the software’s latest release.

Spatial Stats. in ArcGIS: A preview chapter from the Springer’s Handbook of Applied Spatial Analysis.

CATMOGs: A hugely successful series of publications that cover the basics of spatial analysis, they have been written by many of the pioneers in the field. Topics include The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (Openshaw), Voronoi (Thiessen) Polygons (Boots), Spatial Autocorrelation (Goodchild).

CASA Working Papers: A shameless plug for my fellow researchers. The nice thing about these is you don’t need to be part of an academic institution to access academic research.

I am sure there are many others and I welcome your suggestions…

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Making Maps with R

Jan 13 2010 Published by James under Interests, London, Software, Visualisation

***This tutorial has been updated, please click here***

I frequently use R (a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics) for data analysis.  As almost all my data are spatial it is often good to produce a map of the results without having to export the data into another GIS package. I am often asked how to do this so I have included here the code I used to create the map you see below. It should be quite straightforward to substitute my data with your own shapefile and alter some of the parameters such as the colour and the break points to produce your own map. For those interested in more advanced spatial analysis with R I recommend this book.

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UCL Geography Officially becomes ESRI Development Centre

Sep 05 2009 Published by James under Development Centre, ESRI, Software

The UCL Geography Department has been officially awarded ESRI Development Centre (EDC) status. Paul Longley is the EDC Coordinator and as an ESRI (UK) sponsored PhD student I am the EDC GIS Specialist. This is great news as we were awarded the EDC status over a year ago (the first department in the UK to achieve this)  but have not been able to benefit from the additional software licenses or award the “EDC Student of the Year” as logistical and legal problems have had to be overcome. These are all sorted and we can now crack on with cutting edge research using ESRI software. For those interested a report on our past year’s activities as an EDC can be downloaded here.

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