I’m often talking to people about how open Internet technologies enable emergent innovations… and Eric Fischer provided an excellent example of what you can do when you have free access to seemingly unrelated data sets.
To create this image of San Francisco (he’s currently posted 50 maps), he took the geo-tagged data from photos uploaded to Flickr and Picasa, then banged the locations against OpenStreetMap using Perl and Ghostscript to overlay travel vectors of the photographers. Specifically, he compared photos taken by the same photographer within 10 minutes and bounded by 3 miles to compute and plot their travel vector. The resulting map is color-coded to indicate black=walking (7mph), red=bicycling (19mph), blue=street vehicles (43mph), green=freeway vehicles or rapid transit (>43mph).
I’m not going to argue for/against the privacy issues embedded within geo-tagged photos. That’s a separate issue, but this does clearly illustrate that when people have free and open access to data, they’ll combine them in clever and unique ways to generate something entirely new (and potentially useful).
Emergent Innovations: Geo-Tagged Photos Create City Maps
To create this image of San Francisco (he’s currently posted 50 maps), he took the geo-tagged data from photos uploaded to Flickr and Picasa, then banged the locations against OpenStreetMap using Perl and Ghostscript to overlay travel vectors of the photographers. Specifically, he compared photos taken by the same photographer within 10 minutes and bounded by 3 miles to compute and plot their travel vector. The resulting map is color-coded to indicate black=walking (7mph), red=bicycling (19mph), blue=street vehicles (43mph), green=freeway vehicles or rapid transit (>43mph).
I’m not going to argue for/against the privacy issues embedded within geo-tagged photos. That’s a separate issue, but this does clearly illustrate that when people have free and open access to data, they’ll combine them in clever and unique ways to generate something entirely new (and potentially useful).
Provenance: I heard about this via a tweet from @PeteWright, read a blog post (including the comments by Eric explaining his process), and ended up at Eric’s Flickr page.