Lessons to learn from the BNP map

Details of over 10,000 members of the UK British National Party appeared in the public domain after a former member supposedly leaked the list online. Links to the data were made highly visible on sites such as Digg.com.

Then a Google map mash-up was created - zoom in to find the BNP member in your street!

The Guardian decided against embedding or linking to the map and instead used this still image (left) to illustrate their coverage.

Techcrunch did carry the map, much to the disapproval of some.

Ben Charlton (spod.cx), who created the map that appeared on TechCrunch, has now removed the Google map from his site and replaced it instead with a heat map (left) saying that,

I have decided to take down the map. Many people have commented that the map does give a false impression of accuracy, despite my making this clear, and I'm tempted to agree. I do not want to single anybody out and by removing the accuracy from the map it is possible that it ends up incorrectly implying a property contains a BNP member. It has been suggested that an inaccurate map that doesn't make that clear is worse than publishing the list itself, and I think that's a reasonable comment

So what does all of this mean?

Well let's forget about this particular data set, your view on the BNP and their place in the UK democratic process is not relevant.

What is relevant, and important, is the eagerness in this digital age with which a dataset that happens to contain location information is so readily displayed on a map.

The developments by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, OpenStreetMap (and the rest) have opened up some fantastic opportunities for displaying content with improved geographical context and given us the tools to make huge or complex data sets much more accessible and viewable.

But if you make something more accessible then more people will access it, or at least that is the aim, and people generally believe what they see.

It should be obvious, but if you put a pin on a map - make sure the pin is in the right place!

Are you pointing at a person? Or a house? How sure are you that the pin is in the right place? You have to be pretty damn precise to get each individual building correct.

If you are pointing at a postcode area, a district, even a street, then do you have the correct marker device?

So much of our data is not at the level of accuracy whereby you could literally stand on the spot marked 'x' but, largely due to the way these tools currently work, we still use pins to suggest a level of precision and accuracy that might not be there.

Maptube is one example of a tool that is looking at better ways of displaying this data, although by allowing full use of the navigation tools on applications such as Google Maps users may still derive an inaccurate message.

For example, is it really fair to assume that the people living in houses on the right are not affected by the Greater Manchester Congestion Charge proposal whereas those on the left would work or shop elsewhere if the charge was introduced? Zoom right in and even next-door neighbours appear to have a very different view.

The problems are varied and the solutions not always straightforward but I suggest remembering a couple of simple points would be very useful.

1. Always, always ask yourself, does this content really need to be on a map? Does the map provide something that other methods for viewing the data don't?
2. Are you using the right mapping tool, the best visual markers? There are so many geo-related applications available on the web right now, so why is it still always a Google Map mashup?
   
3. Are the markers/points/lines in the right place? Even when you zoom in to high levels of detail? Is there anything potentially misleading about the visual representation? Do you need any supplementary text explaining the map?
4. And finally, to be sure, does this content really need to be on map?
   

ITN puts news on the map

Following Trinity Mirror's experiment with the Liverpool Echo, journalism.co.uk has reported on ITN's use of Google Maps to provide users with geo-located news stories.



The simple interface currently allows you to specify a minimum number of stories, a central location point and a time period over which you are interested in news content.

Upon entering this data the map view refreshes to display standard Google pin-points to illustrate stories nearby.

The above screenshot is the result of searching for a minimum of 5 stories nearest to Bristol from the last 7 days.

The fifth nearest news item that appears on the map is actually located in Portsmouth, nearly 100 miles from Bristol, so it's not exactly a local news service - but then ITN is not a local news provider so it would be wrong to expect too much content at this level of granularity.

However, the amount of content appearing on the map still seems a bit thin for a news provider such as ITN - presumably due to the number of news items that are not being geo-coded as they don't relate to a specific point on the map.

Mapping and poverty (Blog Action Day 2008)

The 2008 theme for Blog Action Day is Poverty, a subject that hasn't been out of the papers in one form or another for a long time.

I thought I'd start with a fairly obvious Google image search for "poverty map". Geographic.org appears to come up trumps with the fairly straightforward World Poverty Map (2000) in its collection.


Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission.

On the surface this appears self-explanatory but on closer inspection it is confusing, even misleading, that the white areas are labelled in the key as "No Data".

This doesn't really help provide a true picture of the world situation given the amount of white space on the map.

A more colourful, and complex, representation of the world's financial state is provided by the Helsinki University of Technology's Self Organizing Map (SOM). 39 quality of life indicators (from 1992) were used to compare countries and graphically align countries with similar characteristics.

In colour coded form it looks like this:-



And in more conventional map form it looks like this:-



There were plenty of other images returned via Google but nothing that really offered me anything of interest or made me feel that I was learning anything new.

Then I came across www.povertymap.net, a website aimed at "Promoting the use of poverty maps in policy making and targeting assistance, particularly in the areas of food security and environmental management."

Unfortunately the section that used to contain selected examples of poverty maps has been removed as the site owners have "not been satisfied with the quality of the entries, nor the technical implementation of the database." If nothing else it is refreshing to see this level of integrity on the web.

Something quite different is the London School of Economics' Charles Booth Online Archive which offers a fascinating insight into poverty mapping in the 19th Century.

The Maps Descriptive of London Poverty are perhaps the most distinctive product of Charles Booth's Inquiry into Life and Labour in London (1886-1903). An early example of social cartography, each street is coloured to indicate the income and social class of its inhabitants.

The lowest classification level, A, is indicated by the colour black on the map and is described in detail as:

The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink

Poverty has always existed. There will always be a range of wealth and quality of life within any population group, however big or small. In this sense there will always be poverty, there will always be some people less well off than others.

But gaining a better understanding of the situation, educating all of us about the cause and effect of poverty, and encouraging more people to look for ways to narrow the gap, to help those less fortunate, is becoming increasingly important in the world today.

Improving access to the underlying data and finding much better methods of visualising this information might just help this education process... maybe, just maybe, mapping can play a role.

There are plenty more poverty maps on the web, here are just a selection of my recommended links for further reading:-

• The World Bank guide to poverty mapping.
• The Global Poverty Mapping Project.
• More on Charles Booth.
• Rural Poverty Portal - World Poverty Map.
• UNICEF - The State of the World's Children 2005.
• BBC News - Child Poverty in the UK.

How to plan your next holiday

After I published a post on my personal blog about the lack of decent tools on the web to help plan a holiday a friend pointed me in the direction of Opodo's new AirTools service.

It's not quite the complete answer but it's certainly heading in the right direction.

Within a very short time of playing with the five different tools available I found myself hooked on the EscapeMap feature.

Simply enter your starting destination and a broad idea of where and when you want to go and up pops a Google Map with details of destinations and cheapest available price.

Clicking on a destination provides further details of the cheapest deal with the option to click through and further specify your travel to that destination.

Further filters above the map let me decide what type of holiday I'm after (beach, shopping, history?) and further specify location and price.

The other tools on offer, CombiFlight, CheckFlight, MyAirline and FlexiFlight are all attempts at providing a more distinctive online travel service but don't really go far enough in my opinion and don't feel very different to the websites I'm used to.

EscapeMap is not perfect, it still requires quite a lot of time and effort to assess what my options are and doesn't really provide the answer to my original question, "is it not possible for me to ask for some holiday suggestions departing from Airport X on date Y, returning on date Z, and to view a list of destination options?"

It is a step in the right direction though, and a great, simple and effective use of mapping tools on the web... more please.

Trinity Mirror launch beta local news map

As reported by The Guardian, Trinity Mirror have today announced the launch of a map-based local news service on their Liverpool Echo website.

Chief Executive Sly Bailey said that the service was a follow-up to the development of a series of hyper-local websites across the group.

"As a next step we're launching a map-based news service across our regional sites with our editorial content geo-tagged and pinpointed to postcode level bringing our brands ever closer to our users and this is live in a public beta today on the Liverpool Echo."



A few smaller examples of this approach have been around for a while - most notably the SE1 News Map - but this is the first major news publisher to try this map based approach.

A quick look at the story tags suggests there are 541 geo-tagged stories on the Liverpool site from the last two and a half months - and that presents something of a design and usability challenge to present this volume of content within a single map window on the web.

Update: Journalism.co.uk looks at where the rest of the UK local/regional news providers currently are in the geo-tagging game.

Going for a run?

This morning I ran 6.6306 miles. The first mile was very much downhill but the 6th mile was a very steep uphill climb. During the run I burnt 937 calories*.

This is all good news**. What is even better news is that I know all of this information without having spent a single penny on a fancy new running watch with built-in GPS.

I know all of this because afterwards I plotted my run on the Gmap Pedometer, a very simple Google Maps based application that provides all the information above and more, and lets you save your run to a unique URL for future reference.

View a larger screenshot of my run for better detail.



My struggles with bending fiddly pieces of string along faded roads on badly folded, torn-but-sellotaped paper maps are well in the past and for the last 6 months or so this website has become invaluable.

A shining example of a well-executed, simple but extremely effective tool that delivers exactly what is required.

Although it does mean I can no longer pretend that I've run further than I actually have!

* I don't believe that I did burn 937 calories. More to the point, I've really no idea how many calories I did burn but I do know that the Gmaps Pedometer has no clue how fast I completed my 6.6306 miles, it only knows my body weight and distance completed.

Maybe a combination of distance, body weight and time would allow a more accurate calorie calculation but for all this website knows, I could have gone for a gentle stroll this morning ( I promise it wasn't a gentle stroll!).

** It is particularly good news as I am training to run two half-marathons in one week in October and raising money for the British Heart Foundation - feel free to sponsor me if you wish.

Google maps gone wrong?

Google Maps is now exclusively using TeleAtlas as it's mapping data provider, dropping all previous information supplied from NavTeq.

This appears to have resulted in a noticeable increase in errors according to reports from The Map Room and The Earth is Square.

MapTube: Create, combine and share your data on maps

Seeing a recent post from The Map Room reminded me that I had neglected to finish an earlier post I had started about MapTube, a website for sharing maps created with the GMapCreator software, released by University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).

The main principle of MapTube is that shared maps can be overlayed to compare data visually. For example, to see a map of the London Underground overlayed on top of a map of population, go to the search page and enter the keywords "tube" and "population". Then click on the two relevant maps to add them. They will be displayed when you click on "View".

The maps themselves are not stored on the server, but only a link to another site on the Internet where the map is already published. When maps are shared, information about what the map is and what it shows is entered by the owner and this is stored on the server along with the link to where the map is published. The raw data is never stored on the Internet as the maps comprise the pre-rendered tiles made by the GMapCreator, so this is a safe way of sharing a map without giving away the raw data used to create it.

The BBC (my employer) has used the site to run a couple of user surveys on issues such as the credit crunch and anti-social behaviour and then display the results on a map.

As a simple tool for creating choropleth maps - where the data is gathered by a defined geographical area - it seems to work really well.

Overlaying multiple maps is a bit more fiddly but I can see how it could be a very rewarding feature of the site.

Some of the combinations I tried were hard to decipher and added no real benefit but as the site develops and the number of shared maps increases this should improve - and being able to easily send a link to your newly created combined map is good news.

One suggestion. More often than not, the complexity of the Google maps foundation layers are too detailed and distracting from the data layers.

Using simplified base layers or providing a fade function as in Ordnance Survey's new UK Election Map service would be a good move.

Internet Mapping causing 'long term damage'

From BBC News ->

Internet mapping is wiping the rich geography and history of Britain off the map, the president of the British Cartographic Society has said.

Mary Spence said internet maps such as Google and Multimap were good for driving but left out crucial data people need to understand a landscape.

Mrs Spence was speaking at the Institute of British Geographers conference in London.

Google said traditional landmarks were still mapped but must be searched for.

Ms Spence said landmarks such as churches, ancient woodlands and stately homes were in danger of being forgotten because many internet maps fail to include them.

She said: "Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history - not to mention Britain's remarkable geography - at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day.

Read more.

Google investigating strange trees

Stinky Journalism goes into the detail of how this poor attempt at cloning in Photoshop could be very damaging to the reputation of Google Maps - issues of accuracy and trust etc.

The prospect of well done, difficult-to-detect photoshopped photos taking over Google Maps – as opposed to the amateurish tree cloning exhibited in the golf course – is a real potential threat.

A Google spokesperson has reportedly commented that “We’re aware that there seems to be an anomaly in our imagery and are working to determine what happened.”

Google, quite rightly, need to respond in such a way to assure everyone that they have sufficient levels of trust in their data providers and are able to identify and deal with a third party supplying them with inaccurate or poor quality imagery.

The rest of us just need to remember our common sense and intelligence. If you are relying on third party information for something important then, whether that third party is Google or a bloke in the local pub, remember to check the facts.

Found via GIS Lounge.

New web application to add contextual mapping to your website

MapMyPage is a new web application that allows you to add contextual map information for any locations mentioned on your web page.

An explanation of how it works is on the site:

MapMyPage uses its own proprietary technology in combination with MetaCarta's GeoTagger and the Google Maps API to identify locations in web pages and display corresponding maps. MapMyPage also provides hyperlinks to relevant content with every map including directions from Google Maps, bird's-eye views from Google Earth, photos from Panaramio, weather from Weather Underground, articles from Wikipedia, news from Google News, events from Zvents, concerts from Gruvr, activities from Viator, trips from Kayak, travel books from Amazon, travel information from WikiTravel, real estate listings from PropSmart, jobs from Indeed, classifieds from Oodle, web search results from Google, blogs from Google Blog Search, videos from YouTube, radio stations from Radio-Locator, TV listings from Yahoo TV, gifts from CafePress, and auctions from eBay.

A comment on AllPointsBlog points out that this feature is available in Internet Explorer 8 which is all well and good, but I use Firefox and I'm sure many other people use different browsers to IE8. A simple web app, that can be customised and coded into pages, has to be the way to go for allowing people to incorporate the functionality into their own content.

So does it actually work?

Well, let's try a few examples and see what comes up:

In my life I have visited Exeter, London, Nottingham and Devon but I have never been to Bangor in Wales or Bangor in Northern Ireland.

In this simple test it has worked fairly well with straightforward towns/cities of a reasonable size.

A number of usability issues around the small size of the pop-up window and having all of those text links squashed into the pop-up bubble. It also took me a while to figure out how to get rid of the map window as well (you simply click outside the window!).

For Nottingham, the initial view is much too zoomed in and I had to zoom out to check that I was actually looking at Nottingham.

Exeter worked much better in this respect and London was generally ok although a few times the zoom level was different and a small number of times I clicked on London the image on the right popped up.

Not really what I would expect of a map depicting the location of London!

Countries suffer from a similar problem with Wales and Northern Ireland represented by a point somewhere near the middle of the country - but the map so zoomed in that it's hard to make out where you are.

Devon, a county in the South West of England, didn't even trigger a response from the application.

Using Bangor was a bit like asking a trick question - although it does highlight one of the common problems with simple geo-tagging solutions like this... many places have the same name. This is how wikipedia copes with the problem. Using MapMyPage the Northern Ireland instance appears and the Welsh option, and others, are ignored.

I also experienced a number of broken links or links to un-related content when clicking on the items in the pop-up for the country items. Exeter however, a decent sized and uniquely named (in the UK at least) city, proved much more successful in providing relevant content.


So, in my brief look so far (and it has been a brief look) I think the idea behind this is really quite cool and I'd love to see it developed and improved further, but definitely some work to do around the design/usability of the map widget and in finding solutions to some of the more complex issues of geotagging and referencing location data.

I spotted a Google Street View car...

... and, like Jon, I found it strangely quite exciting!



The sight of seeing the car driving through the streets of Birmingham did make me ponder one question which I hadn't really considered before.

With the increased awareness these days around climate change and the damage we are doing to the natural world, are Google doing anything to offset the environmental damage caused from driving cars around every street in all the major cities in the United States and Europe... and presumably, one day, a large portion of the world?

A quick search of the Street View pages on Google don't provide any clues to the answer... can anyone shed any more light on this I wonder?

Mapping the Caribbean

A £10 pledge and one hour spent mapping features from Yahoo aerial imagery will give you a 60-1 shot of being sent to a Caribbean island on behalf of OpenStreetMap to complete a map and spread the open-source word.

Well, it might do.

The deadline is 30th September and 44 people have already signed up to the pledge, with 16 more needed to hit the 60 person target.

Mapping; for business or for pleasure?

Over at MediaShift Idea Lab, Leslie Rule has been thinking about hyperlocal mapping.

Now personally I can't stand the term hyperlocal, a term that Wikipedia says "...is sometimes used to refer to news coverage of community-level events".

The notion of "community-level" is very confusing in a time when the word community has come to mean so much more than simply a group of people living in the same space.

Or maybe it's simply the 'hyper' prefix that I object to. Is it actually supposed to mean something or is this marketing jargon designed to make a boring old word such as 'local' seem more exciting and innovative?

Has anyone actually defined the difference in real terms between 'local' and 'hyperlocal'... and please don't get me started on 'ultralocal'?

Anyway, back to the post.

With the recent surge in crime mapping activity it's refreshing to hear a questioning voice on the usefulness of this exercise.

"...just placing a crime event on a map does not necessarily give us insight into the story. As the Beyond Broadcast panelist Lee Banville, Editor-in-Chief of the Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, noted simply mapping "doesn't necessarily tell a story, it introduces a story." Otherwise, he pointed out, a map can become a data dump."

I agree. One of the most telling moments of Where2.0 this year was hearing Adrian Holovaty of EveryBlock state that "One question i like to ask myself is, would my site succeed without maps?"

Leslie goes on to suggest that the answer lies in the increased use of a GIS to enable large amounts of data to be utilised.

"Graphical Information System (GIS) is connecting data to maps, but the difference is both in quantity and quality of data, as well as intention. The intent is for analysis, not a superficial look."

I'm less sure about this.

Does analysis carry more importance than a 'superficial look'? If we are talking about visitors to a website or users of a service then I would argue it shouldn't really matter whether they are there for serious analysis or enjoyable browsing.

At the very least there are more important things to consider such as the accuracy, relevancy and usability of the content, whatever its' purpose.

Adena at All Points Blog points out that:

"...it's hard (impossible) to know the intent of software. While I know some of the reasons some products were built or applications developed or implementations completed, that's about what people do with it."

So there must be a balance somewhere. Let's not all rush to put our content onto maps just because we can, and just because we happen to have content that contains location data.

But let's also remember that sometimes it can be quite enjoyable to see data or content on a map without it needing to tell any bigger story or providing any further insight.

Everyblock experiments with council meeting minutes

Tom Loosemore recently posted about the ability to search video footage from House of Commons debates on theyworkforyou.com, pointing out that:

The accessibility and searchability of the web transforms our ability to hold our elected representatives to account for their actions in Parliament.

Now hyper-local news mapping site Everyblock has launched in two new US cities, Charlotte and Philadelphia, and is testing some interesting new information sources which have the potential to take this accountability another step forward.

Everyblock Charlotte will be providing access to relevant information within city council meeting minutes and Charlotte zoning minutes (NB: Zoning rules regulate how land can be used. Landowners must get city council approval to develop property in ways that do not conform to current zoning classifications.)

Everyblock Philadelphia will be publishing information from the Philadelphia Rules committee (The Rules committee considers matters relating to municipal development and zoning, the city planning commission and housing and redevelopment authorities, among other things.) and Philadelphia Streets and Services agendas.

We're analyzing the text of these meeting minutes/agendas for all locations referenced therein. If the city council or rules committee mentions something near you, you'll see it on your EveryBlock page. This is often highly relevant local information about zoning changes, etc.

Planning applications (or 'zoning changes' in US speak) have always been a great example of ultra-local information that are extremely important to the (usually) small number of people that they affect.

By making this information easily accessible, as well as a host of other related data around local services and civic issues, these sites could well lead the way towards a truly essential, ultra-local service.

Managing large sets of un-structured data, and making them easy to use, searchable and relevant is not an easy task and the location tagging and location based search mechanism will be crucial to the success of the project.

Everyblock Charlotte also includes information on 911 calls to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (maybe the ultimate information resource on crime mapping in your area?) and notice of any new books and DVDs that have been added to your local library.

More information on journalism.co.uk.

The State of the Map Conference 2008

The second international State of the Map conference from OpenStreetMap takes place in Limerick, Ireland on 12th-13th July, 2008.



Ed Parsons won't be attending but recommends everyone else does so if you are interested take a look at the schedule.

Lots of useful information on openstreetmap for those that are going this year.

Mapping public information

An interesting post from Andrew Turner with his thoughts on the Beyond Broadcast Conference, this year looking at Mapping Public Media.

It is quite obvious the very prevalent impact and interest in mapping and geographic visualization of data. The tools have become approachable and the public comfortable, even expecting, rich cartographic interfaces and exploration. Also, being a US Election year, voting maps are obviously in high supply.

There's no denying that many forms of visualising location-based data, particularly mapping, are becoming very prevalent on the web and mobile platforms.

However, I'm still yet to be convinced that the tools are approachable to the majority of users, or that the public are comfortable with interfaces that are often complex and require more than a little effort to explore.

There are obviously plenty of good and bad implementations of maps/mapping on the web so it would be wrong to label them all with the same criticism - and, for the time being at least, I'm going to avoid picking out my own examples.

People are familiar with using maps in the context of finding their way from place A to place B, or for checking the location of a particular place. When it comes to browsing and searching content on a map then this is still a new process for many people and user experience designers need to remember this when designing new applications.

Don't forget, it's not about the map - it's about providing the best and simplest access to the content and underlying data.

One particular example can be seen in the recent interest in putting crime data onto maps - taking a lead from the original Chicago Crime Map (which has interestingly expanded into EveryBlock and is much less reliant on maps to display the data than the old site).

• BBC NEWS | Politics | Online maps to show local crime
  Online maps with crimes plotted on them every month are set to be introduced in England and Wales, Gordon Brown says.

Two examples of existing 'crime maps' in the UK:-

• www.beatcrime.info - Get The Picture of Crime in Your Area
  Welcome to Beatcrime where you can find out about crime on your beat and your street

• MyNeighbourhood - West Midlands Interactive Crime Mapping Application
  MyNeighbourhood provides a unique and interactive community safety experience for residents of the West Midlands. View the latest crime in your neighbourhood, learn about crime prevention and have your say.