Photo by Chris Blakeley

My goal with OpenHeatMap is to have the computer handle all of the messing around that’s usually required to load data into a GIS system. I want to accept anything that describes a location, rather than forcing users to spend endless time massaging their input data.

This is fairly straightforward with country names, zip codes, and even US county names, but I’ve struggled to find a good solution for turning addresses into latitude, longitude positions. All of the free APIs out there are either very accurate but have crippling limits on how often you can call them, or are unlimited but with very low precision. The going rate for commercial geocoding is $10 per thousand addresses, which ruled that right out!

Happily I’ve found a solution. Schuyler Erle and Jo Walsh created an open-source Perl module a few years ago called Geo-Coder-US. It uses the public-domain Tiger/Line data from the US census to look up American addresses. In my tests of the online version it was remarkably accurate (much better than OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim for example) though the authors warn that rural coverage is not as good. The only downside was that the actual database file to accompany the code was too large for the authors to host, so I had to spend some time digging around the census FTP site to find the right source files, download all 9 GB of them and then run the database creation which took several hours.

To save anyone else from having to go through the same struggle, I’ve uploaded a version of the project to github that contains the compiled database file. Be warned, the database is almost a gigabyte in size, so it’s not a quick download! You may also need to install Geo-Coder-US-1.00.tar.gz via cpan to grab all the dependencies. Once you have it, cd into the directory and try running

eg/lookup.pl “2543 Graystone Pl, Simi Valley, CA 93065”

You should see the following output:

“2543 Graystone Pl, Simi Valley, CA 93065”, 34.280874, -118.766207

You can either pass multiple addresses as command line arguments, or pipe a file to the script and it will treat each line as an address and output as CSV. The original authors also include a SOAP server script for Perl, so you could also run this as a web service. I’m going to be moving OpenHeatMap to using this, so look out for more accurate address locations, at least for American data.

A big thanks to Schuyler and Jo for making this code available in the first place, do keep them in mind for any location consulting work you might have.

I learned a lot from my Five Nations of Facebook post, but the biggest lesson was how good maps are at telling complicated stories in a simple way. It left me wanting to build more of them, but I didn't want to code up a whole new piece of software for each one. I spent some time looking around for some applications to help me build online interactive maps, but couldn't find any that met my needs. So, I set out to build the tools I wished I had.

Six months later, I'm finally launching the first public release of OpenHeatMap. What is it? For a quick answer check out the gallery, but the long version is that there's two sides, a service for users and an open-source framework for developers. Here's what each offers.

For Users

My one-sentence description is "YouTube for maps". If you have location data in an Excel spreadsheet, you can save it out as a CSV file, upload it to OpenHeatMap and get an interactive online map that you can customize, share and embed.

For Developers

OpenHeatMap is a JQuery plugin for embedding maps in your page. It will render in either Flash or Canvas to work across as many platforms as possible. I've licensed it under the GPL, the code is on github, and all of the data sources are under open-source licenses, so you should be able to use it without any of the pesky terms-of-service restrictions that come with some of the commercial solutions.

I'm still working like crazy to iron out bugs and improve the service (trying to get it working a lot more reliably on the iPhone for example), so please give it a try and let me know what you think via pete@mailana.com. I'll be blogging about some of my favorite maps over the next few days, so let me know if you create some that you'd like to share as well.

And finally a big thanks to everyone who's helped me get the project this far, all of the pre-release testing and feedback from my regular readers was incredibly helpful. In particular I'd like to thank:

– Steve Coast for giving me the initial drunken shove towards building this

– Peter Batty for educating a newbie on the geo world

– Michal Migurski for creating so many awesome maps, and giving early feedback

– Dan Armstrong for insightful guidance on what data analytics professionals like him really need

– Joe Kelly and Chris Hathaway for generously sharing some fascinating data sets

– Josh, Rob and Jud for their constant support and testing help

(I’m just back from a two-night camping trip at Lake Granby high in the Rockies, and that’s a view from our site)

How to nurture data scientists – There’s a whole new generation of data geeks quietly emerging who don’t fit in with the traditional classifications and Ben covers what they need to thrive within an organization. “The web is awash with data, much of which might be useful for your business analysis if you had a team of data scientists”

WhereDoYouGo – A fascinating open-source project to map your FourSquare habits via @rgaidot

Getting started with Map Reduce – Scott Hendrickson saved my bacon at the last Boulder/Denver Hadoop meetup. I’d left the location and talk arrangements until the last minute but he came through with a killer beginners guide to Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce service. He’s uploaded the slides here, and though his narration was hilarious, even just the notes and the links he includes are valuable for anyone thinking of using Hadoop

AggData – What is it with Texas and data startups? I’m already a big fan of 80Legs and InfoChimps, and just discovered this source of data sets in the Lone Star state. What’s really interesting is that it’s all publicly available information, with a lot of store locations pulled from websites, but it’s hard to gather unless you’re willing to do some serious head-scratching writing your own crawlers.

Rent-a-treehouse – I don’t normally respond to SEO people who want me to promote their sites, but when Chris Horner emailed me I was actually pretty fascinated by these odd European vacation rentals, so I decided to pass them along for free. You could also have your pick of a couple of castles, a shepherd’s hut or even a cave.

Picture by Esther Kirby

Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geo‐Tagging – A thought-provoking paper that looks at the real-world security holes that the new streams of location information create. A great example is the coordinates silently embedded in many photos – if you post a picture of a valuable item to Craigslist then anyone could work out where you live, and so where to steal it from

Free GIS Data – A small but useful collection of geographic data sets. This together with the world boundaries at Thematic Mapping opens up a lot of possibilities for geographic visualizations

Heat maps with the Google Flash API – This tutorial walks you through the coding steps you need to create your own thematic maps

Should BP nuke its leaking well? – After spending a childhood so convinced a nuclear apocalypse was imminent that I used to refuse to go into town with my parents, I’ve retained a fascination with the weapons, so I was glad to see an in-depth analysis of this idea. My favorite quote by far is “I would recommend that the international community not listen to the Russians. Especially those of them that offer crazy ideas. Russians are keen on offering things, especially insane things.”

A phone call from the census – I wonder is this is the equivalent of a Rorschach blot for your attitude to name-badge employees? Erik Gordon seems baffled by the fact that the census employee calling him has to rigidly stick to a script as she checks the census details he’d mailed in, and gets self-righteously stroppy. Reading it as someone who was forced to ask “Would you like cashback?” to every single customer at my checkout no matter how inappropriate it seemed or risk getting fired, I just feel bad for the girl who’s calling. Spending a bit of time on the bottom rungs of companies with that level of hyper-controlled process makes you look at these encounters differently.

To celebrate the overthrow of British tyranny, I've decided to throw an open Independence Day barbecue on Sunday. Beer, pets and children are all welcome, so swing by 3865 21st St, Boulder anytime between 3 and 9pm. If you're lucky I'll be trotting up and down the street wearing my redcoat uniform while guys in bushes take pot-shots at me.

Photo by Broken Simulcra

Email Data Source – These guys had a cunning idea – listen in to commercial mailing lists by subscribing to them. They then analyze all of the data they gather to build a detailed picture of different industries and companies email marketing. It surprised me at first, but a lot of the companies I talk find their email lists are their most effective marketing channels despite their distinct lack of trendiness, so I'm pleased to see someone innovating around them.

Brien Lane, Melbourne – This Australian alley has been covered with charts representing real demographic information from the area. I love seeing visualization like this out in the real world, it makes me want to visit. Here's some more photos.

Clue is a renewable resource – This reminds me so much of my experiences at Apple. I spent over a year battling their legal department to honor an agreement we'd made when I joined, to allow me to just fix bugs in the same open-source project that had got me hired. A good friend spent a lot longer trying to get them to sign off on an Objective C mode he'd built for Emacs, and as far as I know still hasn't succeeded in releasing that simple config into the wild with the company's blessing. And Apple is actually one of the good guys when it comes to open-source, so I can only imagine what some other places must be like.

Chartbeat for the ChatRoulette site – I've been using Chartbeat on one of my own sites recently, but actually seeing it running on a site with serious numbers of visitors makes its power a lot clearer.

Official Seattle crime map – While it's nowhere near as slick as others like the San Francisco Crimespotting map, I'm impressed to see a city government produce one of these for themselves. Hopefully more official bodies will see the advantages of making data available in an easy-to-use form like this.

Portraits from the Congo at 50 – An astonishing collection of photos showing people living in the DR of Congo, together with short stories talking about their lives. Anyone who’s read In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz will understand what a hell-on-earth the Congo has been for the last hundred years, but the tenacity of people determined to keep living their lives is amazing.

Conspiratorial Thinking – The best explanation I’ve seen of why otherwise-smart people can go spectacularly wrong when they only have a superficial understanding of a domain. The other side of any argument rarely consists of idiots and crazy people, so when I find myself asking “how could they be so dumb?”, it’s usually a sign I’m missing something important.

Mountain Lion Kittens in the Santa Monica Mountains – Liz was lucky enough to see the back end of a lion disappearing down a trail when we lived in LA. I never saw one myself, but always felt amazed to be living in a place so wild it still had them roaming free.

Data sets for data mining – A good list of high-quality sources of large data sets

Goin’ down that road feeling bad – At the start of this song Woody Guthrie talks about its creator, how “he wrote this song… or got it started”. The dominant model of the 20th century was the ‘auteur theory’, trying to find a single person to focus on as the sole driving force behind any project, but I felt the way Woody phrased it there captures a lot more of the reality of the creative process. Everything worthwhile I’ve been involved in has taken both a crazy person to start things rolling and a lot of people to join in and actually build it. I feel a post about “folk coding” coming on, it feels like the open source world has a lot in common with the way traditional music was passed around and improved.

Here’s a rehearsal for the short talk I’ll be giving to the Social Developer’s Summit tomorrow. Be warned, there’s lots of cute pictures of dogs.

Photo by Search Engine People

Informed Consent in Information Technology – An awesome PhD thesis on the problems with those ridiculous license agreements we all click through without reading, and even better with some practical suggestions on how to fix those problems. Apparently Catherine's now looking for more funding to continue her work – am I allowed to dream that Apple or Microsoft might want to bring her on board to fix their EULAs?

TravellerMap – I was never quite cool enough to play the Traveller role-playing game back in the 80's, but they built a fascinating background universe. I stumbled across this site by accident, but the author has built a beautifully detailed interactive map for exploring the whole galaxy, and I'm in awe of this as a labor of love.

Analysis of the 'Flash Crash' – I've always been hooked on odd events, and May's sudden stock-market drop and recovery is one of the oddest I've come across. I don't have enough financial world chops to understand everything in this paper, but it's a detailed technical post-mortem of what actually happened.

Wikiposit – Another rich collection of public data sets, mostly financial, with the site code released under the GPL

Swarm Light – This art installation sends shivers down my spine every time I watch it, and it's a technical masterpiece too, using hundreds of CPUs to control the lights. Make sure you go to 1'30'' in the video, that's where it really starts to take off.