Looks like the data sets at toronto.ca/open might finally actually be open; that is, usable in a way that doesn’t bind subsequent users to impossible terms. The new licence (which unfortunately is behind a squirrelly link) basically just requires you to put a reference to this paragraph somewhere near your data/application/whatever:

Contains public sector Datasets made available under the City of Toronto’s Open Data Licence v2.0.

and a link to the licence, where possible.

Gone are the revocation clauses, which really prevented any open use before, because they would require you to track down all the subsequent users of the data and get them to stop. Good. I think we can now use the data in OpenStreetMap.

While commenting on the licence’s squirrelly URL — I mean, could you remember http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/open_data/open_data_fact_sheet_details?vgnextoid=59986aa8cc819210VgnVCM10000067d60f89RCRD? — I stumbled upon the comedy gold that is the City of Toronto Comments Wall log. There goes my planned reading for the day.

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… or “トロント動物園“, as we locals purportedly call it. The This place has unverified edits legend is a bit of a giveaway. Looks like there’s been some messing about with Google Map Maker, which isn’t always the best tool for the job.

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BIXI Toronto is (nearly) here!

Here are the proposed station locations: Bixi_Toronto_shp.zip (Shapefile) or Bixi_Toronto-kml_csv.zip (KML and CSV).

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Toronto, as understood by the Maidenhead Locator system

After yesterday’s post, I went a bit nuts with working out the whole amateur radio grid locator thing (not that I’m currently likely to use it, though). I’d hoped to provide a shapefile of the entire world, but that would be too big for the format’s 2GB file size limit.

What I can give you, though, is:

• A Perl program that will generate a shapefile of an entire Maidenhead grid field, down to the subsquare level: make_grid.pl. You’ll need Geo::Shapelib to make this work. 324 (= 18²) of these files would cover the whole world, and at 8MB or so a pop, things get unwieldy quickly.
• A Google Earth KML file covering the whole world in 20° by 10° grid fields: Maidenhead_Locator_World_Grid. (If you’re feeling nerdy, here it is in Shapefile format: Maidenhead_Locator_World_Grid-shp).

If anyone would like their grid square in Google Earth format, let me know.

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Making the My Neighbourhood, Canada Day 2010 post took a bit of planning.

Hardware

I attached an Ultrapod to the stem of my bike, and added another velcro wrap for security. The GPSMAP 60CSx fitted quite nicely under the bungees on the rear rack. The Ultrapod didn’t quite have enough stability to stay in place without drooping sometimes. I bought (but haven’t tried) the KODAK Adventure Mount, which might be more stable.

The Camera

… is a fairly basic Canon PowerShot SD790IS. What’s important is that it can run CHDK. I’d set it to take a 6MP picture approximately every 20s using the Ultra Intervalometer script.

Synching the camera to the GPS for geotagging

At the end of the trip, I took a picture of my GPS clock screen:

and then compared the time to the camera’s timestamp using jhead:

$ jhead IMG_0316.JPG
 ...
Date/Time    : 2010:07:01 16:59:50

So if the GPS time is 16:58:55, we need to subtract 55s from the camera time to make them match:

$ jhead -ta-0:00:55 IMG*JPG

And let’s check the result:

$ jhead IMG_0316.JPG
 ...
Date/Time    : 2010:07:01 16:58:55

Perfect.

Geotagging the pictures

I used ExifTool. You could also use Prune if you prefer something more graphical. Exiftool does this with minimal fuss:

$ exiftool -geotag canadaday2010-0.gpx IMG_0*JPG

(I realize I could have used exiftool instead of jhead for the timestamp check, but I’ve been using jhead for about a decade, so I know it well and like its compact output.)

You probably want to make use of a WordPress plugin like Add From Server to speed the upload process.

Adding the OpenStreetMap map

The www.Fotomobil.at » wordpress openstreetmap plugin is very flexible, but rather complex to work with. Here I’m calling the map with both markers (and lots of them) and a GPX trace:

[ osm_map lat="43.729" long="-79.275" zoom="14" width="640" height="480" marker_file="http://glaikit.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/canadaday2010marker.txt" gpx_file="http://glaikit.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/canadaday2010.gpx" ]

(Note that in the example, in order to stop WordPress from interpreting the shortcode, I’ve had to introduce a space after the [ and before the ]; in real life, they’re not there.)

The gpx file is just plain vanilla (canadaday2010.gpx) but the marker file (canadaday2010marker.txt) is a bit special. I must admit to have slightly misused the format, as I discovered that the fourth column, the description, is free-form HTML. As the default is to popup a small image thumbnail, I wedged in code to link to the full-sized image when the thumbnail was clicked. This required me to work out what attachment ID WordPress thought each picture would be. If you’re careful to upload sequentially to a single-user blog installation, you should be okay hitting the right links.

Each line of the marker file was made with a (loooong) shell one liner, an unholy mess of backticks and awk. I’m glad I can’t find it. It really wasn’t pretty at all.

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It was fun – there were geo-aware cupcakes!

• It is very easy to lose days in the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.
• Richard’s OpenStreetMap for the Beginner tutorials are actually really really good.

In a moment of geek worlds colliding, Emma showed up, and now I have people clamouring for tablet at Mappy Hour. Sigh, those old ecommons links just don’t fade …

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Hey, they’ve updated most of the data sets on toronto.ca | Open!

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I went for a bike ride on Canada Day. Click on a bicycle icon to see what I saw.

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The highest point in Toronto has an elevation of 211m, and appears to be in the middle of one of York University‘s playing fields, just southwest of Keele & Steeles W:

The red blob is the 211m contour, and the centre point is at 43.779325°N, 79.492655°W. The contour was derived from the MNR DEM data for the province.

The city says the highest point is 209 m (at intersection of Steeles Ave West and Keele St), which is pretty close in all three axes.

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Beware throwaway comments; that way overanalysis lies. This was a challenge.

Taking the 2006 neighbourhoods population into account, the human centre of Toronto is at 43.717955°N, 79.389828°W …

… pretty close to the one I’ve already worked out by ward.

Scraping the neighbourhood populations was hard. For the 140 neighbourhoods, the data is stored in a pdf with the URL like http://www.toronto.ca/demographics/cns_profiles/2006/pdf1/cpa124.pdf (in this case, 124; Kennedy Park, represent!). The population number is stored in a table on page 2 of each pdf. I used pdf2xml to convert the files into something parseable.

Of course, the tables weren’t exactly in the same place in every file, so I took a sample of 10% of the files, and worked out the X & Y coordinates of the population box. pdf2xml spits out elements like

<TOKEN sid="p2_s427" id="p2_w417" font-name="arialmt" serif="yes" fixed-width="yes" bold="no" italic="no" font-size="7.47183" font-color="#000000" rotation="0" angle="0" x="299.739" y="122.117" base="129.634" width="22.7692" height="9.94501">17,050</TOKEN>

Yes, I should have used an XML parser, but a Small Matter of Perl got me 126 out of the 140 matching. The rest I keyed in by hand …

Table after the jump.

The total population I scraped is within 0.1% of the official 2006 population of the city, so I’m good enough.

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