OpenData Toulouse

Free mapping data will elevate flood risk knowledge For the past 17 years we have been capturing LIDAR (Light Detection & Ranging) data in England. LIDAR uses a laser to scan and map the landscape from above and is widely considered to be the best method for collecting very dense and accurate elevation data across the landscape. We use LIDAR to help the work of the Environment Agency in many ways, including creating flood models, assessing coastal change and analysing how land is used. We now have an extensive archive of aerial LIDAR data covering nearly three quarters (72%) of England – the data mainly covers flood plains, coastal zones and urban areas.

Map of scientific collaboration (Redux!) Several years ago, I created a map of scientific collaborations. The attention this map obtained surpassed my wildest expectations; it got published in the scientific and popular press all around the world! I had mainly forgotten about it until I received an email that rekindled my interest in this visualization and I thought it was high time to revisit this visualization. Unfortunately, scientific papers (and associated data) are closely guarded and only a handful of firms have full access to them. I now work in a very different field, so I lost access to this dataset. Famous Perl One-Liners Explained, Part I: File Spacing Hi all! I am starting yet another article series here. Remember my two articles on Awk One-Liners Explained and Sed One-Liners Explained? They have received more than 150,000 views total now and they attract several thousand new visitors every week. Inspired by their success, I am going to create my own perl1line.txt file and explain every single oneliner in it.

New University of Utah center offers some serious computing muscle to handle 'extreme data' SALT LAKE CITY — A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in the fields of science, they can be worth billions and billions of bytes of information. A few years ago, then Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd said "more data will be created in the next four years than in the history of the planet." Hurd's prediction was understated. Studies have showed that humanity has created more computer data than all documents in the entire past 40,000 years — and that was in 2007.

Population Lines Print I recently produced a map entitled “Population Lines”, which shows population density by latitude. The aim was to achieve a simple and fresh perspective on these well-known data. I have labelled a few key cities for orientation purposes but I’ve left off most of the conventional cartographical adornments. I am really pleased with the end result not least because it resembles Joy Division’s iconic Unknown Pleasures album cover, which in itself is a great example of data visualisation as art. The data, from NASA SEDAC, have been mapped many times before and in many beautiful ways but none seem to me quite as compelling as the simple approach here of using only black and grey lines across the page. What amazes me about this map (from where I sit in London) is just how jagged the lines become throughout India, East China, Indonesia and Japan in comparison to “the West” – evidence that we are definitely in the “Asian Century”.

Style space: How to compare image sets and follow their evolution (part 4) This is part 4 of a four part article. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Text: Lev Manovich. All visualizations are created with free open-source ImagePlot software developed by Software Studies Initiative. The distribution also includes a set of 776 images of van Gogh paintings, and the tools that were used to measure their image properties. Google Maps: 100+ Best Tools and Mashups Most people think of Google Maps in terms of finding a place or business, or getting directions from one point to another. Others use the satellite images and terrain mapping features. But there are tons of other uses out there for Google maps. From mapping the weather and news to mapping things that aren't maps at all, like paintings or magazines, Google Maps has a lot to offer. And there are free tools available out there for those who want to use the Google Maps API without doing a bunch of coding.

8 tools for visualizing data with open source Data visualization is the mechanism of taking tabular or spatial data and conveying it in a human-friendly and visual way. There are several open source tools that can help you create useful, informative graphs. In this post we will take a look at eight open source, data visualization tools. Datawrapper Datawrapper was created by journalism organizations from Europe, designed to make data visualization easy for news institutes. Based on a web based GUI (graphics user interface), it promises to let you create a graph in just four steps.

Transforming Data into Visualization Data visualization explains a story to the user; a story that if told well should help the viewer discern information and relationships between the data. Data visualization, for a designer, is the process of taking a complex structure and breaking it down in a way that the reader can easily comprehend. It is a powerful tool used to translate complex data into accessible insights. In this article, I’ll explain the four critical steps we took to create a visualization graph for the World Economic Forum (WEF). Step 1: Decipher the Data The Visible Universe, Then and Now Before the telescope was invented in 1608, our picture of the universe consisted of six planets, our moon, the sun and any stars we could see in the Milky Way galaxy. But as our light-gathering capabilities have grown, so too have the boundaries of the visible universe. Our interactive map shows how the known universe has grown from 1950 to 2011. In the late 1700s, William Herschel, an English astronomer using a telescope with an 18.7-inch aperture, made the first systematic surveys of the skies, revealing more than 2,000 distant galaxies, nebulae and other objects invisible to the naked eye. Since then, increasingly powerful optical and radio telescopes have greatly expanded our store of knowledge.

Data visualization: Science on the map Illustration by the Project Twins When linguist Lauren Gawne roams the valleys of Nepal documenting endangered Tibetan languages, she takes pains to distinguish each dialect's geographical origin. But when it came to producing maps of her results, for many years her cartographic methods were somewhat crude. An Annual Report on One Man's Life Nick Bilton/The New York TimesNicholas Felton and his 2008 annual report. At the end of 2005, Nicholas Felton decided to publish a report that would chronicle his life over the previous year. He looked through his music archives to see how many songs he had listened to. He checked his airline ticket stubs to see how many miles he had flown. He aggregated the number of books read and photos taken.

The “Rules” of Data Visualization Get an Update Geoff McGhee is a journalist and data visualizer at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. Data Points is a new series where we explore the world of data visualization, information graphics, and cartography. In the past decade, computer-aided data visualization has migrated from the halls of science and academia into journalism, marketing, political discourse, and many other parts of everyday life. A lively conversation has developed online about data visualization, with blogs and social media accounts devoted to critiquing them. But what are the rules of a complex practice that draws on research into cognitive theory, graphical perception, statistics and journalism?