Today at the Open Data Hack Day, we spent some time working with the Vancouver business licence data, trying to see if we could make an interesting visualization. The set has 59,356 rows of business licences registered in Vancouver and I was most interested in a map of employees per neighbourhood. Unfortunately, we found some problems with the data.

The biggest issue was that the number of employees per licence is self reported and, as a result, very inaccurate. For example, Inlets Bistro & Lounge is reported as having 148,358 employees which is obviously incorrect. There are also multiple licences issued for many businesses and it is unclear if this is for different departments of the same company or just being reported twice. As a specific example, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP has 45 active business licences for the same address and 0, 1, 3, 700, and 850 employees reported. Choosing how to use these records is then very difficult.

Another problem is that although the business type and business sub types are fairly well defined within the dataset, this is inconsistent with external services. One of the suggestions that arose would be to conform to the North American Industry Classification System, allowing the data to be mashed up with data from Statistics Canada. This could allow for a much richer analysis.

We managed to geocode the data using Google Fusion Tables (many thanks to Tim), which resulted in the following map:

It was very interesting to see where all of the businesses were, some of them were even located in the US. I managed to create a map of the reported number of employees for each neighbourhood from the licences:

This is not a very useful map since the data was so bad and it is certainly not reflective of the actual number of employees in Vancouver, but it was interesting to try.

Here is a map created using Quantum GIS and some open data from the City of Vancouver. It graphs the population growth in Vancouver for each local area from 1981 to 2001. Interesting to note is how much the residential housing boom downtown affected the population growth compared to other areas.

I also created a short screencast showing how to do the calculation yourself:

This past weekend I attended the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit and gave an introduction to open data and beautiful maps. I talked about open data, covered the creation of a map in under 10 minutes, and discussed how to create beautiful maps using advanced techniques like custom tilesets. The video is already online thanks to the hard work of Justin Carlson, posted on his blog here and embedded below:

Tylor Sherman: Open Data & Beautiful Maps from Carlson Media on Vimeo.

Paraphrasing some of the questions and comments at the end of the video:

Question 1: How does generating views with OpenLayers differ than with GMap?
Question 2: Can you use the Google Maps API when using OpenLayers and a Google Maps tileset?
Question 3: How does location.module differ from others storage methods? How do you decide which storage method to use?
Question 4: Can I use tiles to display polygon data and still interact with it?
Question 5: If I have a database of address how can I convert them into latitude and longitude?
Question 6: What other input data types are supported by mapping modules?
Question 7: Can I use a shapefile to generate an overlay?
Question 8: What other tilesets can I use with OpenLayers?
Question 9: Have you played with polygons and highly granular shapefiles?
Question 10: How did you get the Google Map API entry step into the install profile?
Question 11: Ben comments that using geo.module instead of text fields is helpful if you have a lot of data because it decreases the server load by speeding up your queries.

For the talk I created an install profile and drush make file to build a simple and lean Drupal mapping distribution, which for now I have named Quickmaps. The source code for the distribution is available at github.com/tylor/quickmaps. I am making the slides available as a PDF here and have been tracking my Mapnik and Quantum GIS source files at github.com/tylor/vancouver-mapping.

The inspiration for this talk comes from my Water! drinking fountains map for Vancouver. This is a map I created just over a year ago now and it has been really engaging to see it being discussed and used in so many different ways. Here is the original screencast showing how to set up a water fountain map in under ten minutes:

Water! from tylor on Vimeo.

I had a great time sharing this presentation and it led to some great conversations throughout the rest of the summit. Thanks to all of the organizers for putting on such a successful event!

Last week I had the chance to attend not one, but two Library Voices shows here in Vancouver. As I've mentioned before, Library Voices is one of my favourite upcoming Canadian bands, and neither show disappointed. Yelling along with their lyrics was definitely the highlight of last week which coincidentally was my Spring break!

Library Voices has been touring constantly for at least the past two years and they're starting to get some wide recognition. They have tons of literary influence along with a strong dose of good old Canadiana — they are from Regina after all. Following are some photos I took at the shows.

February 15, 2009 at The Media Club:

The Media Club show was definitely the best. The venue is slightly larger and for whatever reason everyone at the show was just... nicer.

Here are some pictures from February 18, 2009 at The Railway Club:

As kind as Library Voices were to come to Vancouver twice, Vancouver was not nice to Library Voices. While they were here they had about $10,000 worth of gear stolen from their van. Here is an appeal to get there gear back from CBC Radio3 on YouTube:

If you haven't listened to them yet, check out their Myspace page; they're really nice people and it's been great to see their fan base grow. Definitely excited to see them come around again!

Here's some more press on Library Voices:

• Library Voices in the Calgary Herald
• Library Voices feature by CityNews.ca
• Profile on CBC Radio 3

I really like the BC Hydro website: it's simple to navigate and is noticeably better than other service sites like Telus or Fido. They make it easy to change to paperless billing, which is why I signed up, and they even give you the data for your daily electricity usage. Following is a graph of mine and I am really happy to see that for each of the past eight months my usage has been down:

What does your usage look like? My average usage for the past eight months in 2008 was 8.5 kWh/day and for the past year 11.58 kWh/day... how does this actually stack up to others? My feeling is that as long as I do better than the last year, every year, I should be ok!

A week and a half ago (let's say on Sept 28) I attended BarCamp Vancouver 2008! Despite the fact that I hang around these events all the time this was officially my first BarCamp. Had a lot of fun that day and I'm still digesting some of the info; here are some of my notes and observations.

Marketing for a cause - check out kiva.org a micro-loan service for helping out people in third world countries. We created a Barcamp 2008 group, so check that out as a place where we can pool some resources ($$) in the name of this event.

Laptop bedouin - working independently with your digital career. Some interesting discussion surrounding living on Galiano Island and working independently from places like Malta or Morocco. Some helpful tips were to make sure you meet your client face-to-face at least once and to make your presence seem local (by being available at the right times). Also, keep your finances local (to Vancouver say) and travel using the 3-month rule of thumb... travelling like a tourist, but working as well.

RDF - try checking our the Operator plugin for Firefox to find and utilize RDF microformats already embedded in webpages like Google Maps, Yahoo! Upcoming, and Flickr (location). Something I thought was that utilizing this data through a plugin for Firefox is not the easiest way for average users to utilize this data. Instead maybe a Javascript library to make options available in a way much like date and event handling in Apple Mail. This keeps the information in context while still making it easier to "jump" into it. My view is that this information is going to become more popular as I'm thinking context is starting to revolutionize the web.

RDF2 - Media re-use, adding the Creative Commons microformat for allowing your content to be found this way. I believe my site is already like this so check the footer of my page for an example on how to RDF-ize your website.

Ubiquity - David Drucker gave me a personal demo on the great Ubiquity plugin for Firefox... creates a Quicksilver-like prompt within your browser to interact with content. Some really great tie-ins for this is with microformats and RDF. All scripts are externally hosted, allowing developers to update and improve remotely. Scripts are easy to write and find. Reminded me of Fluid, kind of a new way of utilizing a browser. Boris Mann also mentioned an interesting idea of componetizing pieces of a webpage, allowing people to copy, paste, and share these services. A good example is a File Upload and Thumbnail creation piece. Why do we build this multiple times and why can't we just share these pieces using a distributed model?

Photocamp - try reversing your prime lense and shooting to get a cheap macro! Hadn't tried this before, here are some results where I'm using an 85mm (f/2) on the body and a 35mm (f/2) reversed:

Thanks to the organizers for a great time and I'm looking forward to next year!

Just stepped in the door from a night of quality music! Some friends of mine hosted a show at Lick in Gastown and I thought I would give a brief description of the night. First up was...

Search Parties — These guys got us all to a great start with their limitless energy. Too bad it was too hot in the venue for more dancing...

Catamaran — Their cutesy guitar lines and lyrics are still rolling through my head, I just wish they could have been clearer as the drums were too loud. I've seen them before and they still resonate for me as a band worth watching.

Library Voices — I had seen this group before in their band National Frost and it didn't take much convincing to bring me back. They have tons of collective energy and manage to stay away from being muddy despite having eleven members. They have a great mix of rhythm and fun melodies and someone complimented later saying "these guys make me happy and good music should do that." I even bought their CD! Definitely check them out if they hit your town or city as they seem to be touring constantly.

The Barcelona Chair — Mikey and Adrienne created the perfect blend to help bring the evening back down. They have lots of emotion and complexity, something I am finding more each time I see them. They are somewhat reminiscent of groups like Boards of Canada or The Album Leaf but with considerably more edge.

Library Voices at Lick photographed by Steve Louie

It's been a very busy past couple of weeks. I finished up a co-op report, helped present at DrupalCamp Vancouver, and started my next co-op job at Raincity Studios.

DrupalCamp was really great and I was glad to have presented on the first day; the stress of presenting and submitting a co-op report gave way to some great talks. Highlights included:

• 'In bed with Rob and Alex' by Social Signal
• 'Themers Guide to jQuery' by Steve Krueger
• 'Module Developers Guide to jQuery' by Katherine Bailey
• 'Strategies for Drupal between servers' by Greg Dunlap

My new job at Raincity Studios is pretty exciting. We're building on the SMS Framework module to provide some better Drupal interaction with SMS. There's a public code repository here. Looking forward to building on this and it seems like there are already a lot of people interested in what we're doing. Expect a post on the Raincity Studios blog about this sometime soon.