The giCentre is engaged in high quality research and education involving the
use of Geographic Information (GI).
We develop the theory, practice and technology that support Geographic
Information Science and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), offer
innovative and high quality learning opportunities and play a leading role
in the international GI research community.
City University hosts Geomob On 21 Jan 2010 Jonathan Raper and David Mountain played host to Geomob - the London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group - at City University.
Speakers included Andrew Eland of Google UK's Mobile Team, Julianne Pearce of Blast Theory, Laurence Penney discussing SnapMap and Andy Walker of Public Earth.
The final talk was given by Mikel Maron discussing OpenStreetMap's Response to the Haiti Earthquake.
giCentre staff win a university prize for research Jo Wood, Jason Dykes and Aidan Slingsby's research has been recognised in the university's annual Staff Research Prize scheme. They received a "commendation" for their novel approaches to information visualisation, their engagement with data users and their research outputs over the past year which include best paper (GISRUK), honorable mention (IEEE InfoVis), visual analytics prize (VAST) and "KML in research" prize (Google).
London Datastore Launch Jonathan Raper chaired the launch of the London Datastore through which huge quantities of previously unavailable data about London is being made available to the public.
A number of high profile speakers contributed to the event at City Hall including Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) and Aneesh Chopra (Chief Technology Officer of the United States).
jisc vre rapid innovation funding The giCentre team has been awarded funding by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under their VRE Rapid Innovation (VRERI) Grant scheme.
In the 'vizTweets' project we'll be developing the HiVE language in the context of various applications areas. We will also produce clients that can generate and interpret HiVE. Doing so will help researchers save and share visualization.
We will develop a means of communicating this information that draws upon and utilises existing microblogging infrastructures to develop a Virtual Research Environment.
visualization pioneers? Our work with Leicestershire County Council featured in issue 32 of 'E-Government Bulletin' under the title "Leicestershire Pioneers ‘Data Visualisation’ For Service Improvement".
The piece describes our 'vizLib' and ongoing 'Timely Information Pilots' projects with LCC. As Rob Radburn says: "
How do you go about looking through 450,000 records?" Well - we developed some innovative and informed approaches with LCC analysts.
giCentre presented with the AGI Best of GISRUK Paper award Jo Wood and Aidan Slingsby attended the AGI annual Awards Dinner and were presented with the AGI Best of GISRUK Paper award for their paper with Jason Dykes and Robert Radburn on OD Maps. The paper was presented by Jo last April at GISRUK09 in Durham and they have just submitted a full paper based on this work that is now under review.
giCentre represents UK at MOVE kick off The European funded Knowledge Discovery from Moving Objects (MOVE) project held its official kick off meeting on 27 Oct in Brussels. giCentre researcher David Mountain attended the meeting representing the UK on the project management committee. MOVE is funded through the EU COST framework which aims to increase European cooperation in scientific and technical research, so provides an opportunity to meet and collaborate with like-minded researchers overseas. The objective of MOVE is to develop improved methods for knowledge extraction from massive amounts of data representing moving objects. This is a cross-cutting theme for the giCentre, drawing on expertise in location-aware computing and geovisualization. MOVE will run until 2013.
Mobile Search chapter published David Mountain has contributed a chapter discussing Mobile Search to the recently published Wiley book, Information Retrieval. David co-wrote the chapter with Hans Myrhaug and Ayse Goker, who also edited the book. The book's target audience is students and researchers with an interest in information retrieval, and its focus is recent developments and future directions in this field. David's chapter explores what is novel about searching for information in a mobile environment, with particular focus on the importance of location in search. Follow the link to buy this book on Amazon.
Computational Geometry Workshop Jo Wood attended a week-long workshop on computational geometry in Vught in the Netherlands in October. Organised by Marc van Kreveld, attendees from around the world assembled to tackle problems that combined computational geometry with GI Science and Information Visualization. The result is likely to be some important publications in this field as well as some new international research collaboration.
Jo Wood to give keynote talk at Geomorphometry 2009. Jo will be delivering the keynote talk on the opening day of Geomorphometry 2009 in Zurich Switzerland. The talk, entitled "Visualizing Geomorphometry: Lessons from Information Visualization" will show how recent developments in information visualization can be used to improve the way in which we use visual methods for understanding landscape. The five day international conference promises to showcase some of the latest innovative and exciting developments in geomorphometry from around the world.
LandSerf 2.3 released The latest version of LandSerf has been released after extensive testing.
New features include the
LandScript scripting language for macro programming and map algebra processing, flow magnitude calculations, new map projections, significantly enhanced Ordnance Survey NTF and MasterMap import and USB GPS communication.
giCentre at GISRUK The giCentre was well-represented at GIS Research UK (GISRUK) conference with research presented by Susanne Bleisch, Delroy Brown, Jason Dykes, Naz Khalili-Shavarini, David Lloyd, David Mountain, Rob Radburn, Aidan Slingsby and Jo Wood.
The conference was hosted by Durham University and the giCentre contributions were a nice mix of projects resulting from MSc dissertations, PhD research and funded projects.
HousePrices Visualization This demo uses treemaps to explore spatial and temporal variation in house prices in London.
It formed a part of our contribution to the GeoViz Digital City Workshop in Hamburg, 3-5 March 2009 (
abstract).
The application demonstrates how 2D ordering and layout in treemaps can be exploited to explore spatial and temporal patterns in data. London property sales over the past eight years are used as a case study.
RAEViewer: Explore the Research Assessment Exercise Results and Funding
Use RAEViewer to explore the RAE Results and Funding through an interactive graphical representation of the 67 Units of Assessment. Institutions can be ordered according to the selectable criteria.
City has improved its research ratings across the University following the publication of the 2008 RAE results, with over 80% of submitted activity rated as recognised internationally or better.
Our visualization application helps identify trends in research quality and funding.
bookScraper: Vocabulary Cluster Graph Our interactive 'clustering' graph has been designed to help compare documents in the bookScraper collection based on the similarity of their vocabularies.
The more similar two publications are, the closer they appear to one another in the graph.
Groups of books with similar vocabularies cluster.
bookScraper: Vocabulary TreeMap Our interactive treemap allows us to explore the 100 most important words in each of the bookScraper publications.
Treemaps are used to show hierarchical information through nested rectangles. The size of each rectangle represents some quantity - numbers of times that words occur in the collection here.
Rectangle positions show the relationships between different levels of the hierarchy and their colours relates to numeric values.
In this interactive application the hierarchy shows words, within (occurring in) books, within (written by) authors.
