But wait – there’s more! Plenty of World Tour events on the way.

I strongly recommend participating if possible. New ideas emerges when You meet new people to discuss new features with. -Personally I’m now experimenting with combining PointClouds with none spatial data. Some great potential there. Will post an update on this later.

So I hope to see You in Malmö or Berlin or possibly somewhere else on the road!

The “.gz” extension shows that they are GNU Zipped (compressed). I used to manually unzip them and then run them through FME Workbench. But FME reads compressed file directly. So just by changing the readers setting to “access*.*” it runs in one flow. And here is the result:

So by a simple Workbench like the below You can easily parse Apache log-files. Pretty cool….

/Ulf Månsson

As the Swedish Christmas Goat succumbs to flames (once again) I came up with the idea to investigate that specific area – in Gavle Sweden. So I quite easily created a FME workbench that starts by sending the coordinate of the (former) Christmas Goat to the TweetSearcher.

I was quite surprised by the amount of actual geocoded Tweets that got returned. The TweetSearcher also returns user information and timestamps. By sorting this info and sending it to a PointConnector I could recreate Paths of the different users who have Tweeted in the area.

Each line in the below picture represents a user who have tweeted at least twice at different times and locations:

Tracking the Railway Tweets

An interesting pattern emerged along the railway. I decided to examine this a bit more. In the below picture I have masked somewhat of the usernames. If You enlarge it by clicking You can clearly see that there have been some tweeting along the tracks:

By playing up the actual Tweets along the track an interesting monolog appears:

Simple translation:”Come on train. I don’t want to spend christmas in Gavle”

Simple translation:”Weird that traincompanies have all that power…”

Simple translation: “Won’t get any further. Train decided that I should spend christmas here….”

Simple translation:”Come on train. I don’t want to spend christmas in Gavle”

The passenger seems a bit disapointed due to some delay in the train schedule. (Personally I would not mind spending christmas in Gavle). Without knowing it this have been very helpful to verify the precision of geocoded Tweets….

Lot’s of FME Desktop and FME Server stuff in the agenda.

Hoping for a lot of fun!

http://bbox.me/osm

/Ulf Mansson (Månsson)

1. You need a boundingbox. Possibly to query a database or maybe call a WMS service.

2. You open a map somwehere on the internet or maybe in another GIS-tool than FME.

3. You locate Your area of interest and manually note of the corner coordinates -the bbox. (xmin is…. ymin is… max lat is…)

4. You manually enter these into FME.

We figured out a smarter way here: http://bbox.me/osm

1. Search for You area of interest (Find Place)

2. Zoom in/out and redefine the bbox (Set to screen)

3. Select the Resource (“6 BBOX Transformer.fmw”) and press “Download”.

Now open the generated Workspace in FME and You have a Transformer with Your Boundingbox!

(If You do have troubles getting it to work with Internet Explorer – You may have to enter bbox.me to the trusted sites).

In short http://bbox.me/osm lets You search and zoom in any area and get a ready-made FME Workbench for that particualar place.

This is making it real easy to extract smaller areas of OSM-data straight into FME.

- Dont forget to tribute OSM-data and MapQuest (and FME from www.safe.com) if You use it !

(If You do use Internet Explorer and have problems getting search to work. Try adding bbox.me to trusted sites).

The major supergreat components I used was:

- Leaflet

- Open MapQuest and tiles.

I will publish new and fresh 2012 Workbenches later on but for now I just include a small instruction. Use this at Your own risk!

Click to enlarge:

The old OSM-extractor in Flex should still work. Read about it here:

http://bbox.me/blog/?p=49

/Regards

Ulf Mansson (Månsson)

While experimenting with bbox.me, more than a year ago, I came up with an interesting search method, “Map Trawling.” In short the method can be described as:

1. Find out placenames within a certain area.
2. Feed all these placenames as keywords into a search-engine.

The result is: Geographic information, Maps, Transit information, Municipal plans, Tourist Guides, Bicycle maps etc…

Not very surprising if You think about it. However, entering these placenames manually is tedious. By automating this with a web-map it gets more fun. It also works with other languages!

So MapTrawler is an early fun beta-version. (Limited with the amount of Webservice-requests Geonames can handle, Some Internet Explorer issues.  Note that MapTrawler do work with my Safari on iPad – but have some issues if you are logged into Google. And as always – You use it at your own risk! )

After reading James Fees blog this was my first go at Mapstraction. – We are about to make a plain HTML/JavaScript version of the OSM Extractor for FME currently running in Flash.

Trying it out in London:

So here are some examples of what can be found:

1. Some sort of fashion-map:

2. A very interesting document about prototype wayfinding in London.

3.  An entertaining map of filming locations in London.

There are also a lot of other findings like guides and KML-files if You switch to search for that.

You can read about the old Flash-version here : http://bbox.me/blog/?p=38

/Regards

Ulf Mansson (Ulf Månsson)
Twitter:@ulfme

By using the “OSM Extractor” to get OSM data (buildings+roads) and combining it with SRTM data I’ve come up with something that (sort of) looks like LiDAR data.

By applying the PointCloud trix by Dmitri at Safe I produced LAS files that might be of interest to someone.

Note that the buildings are not correct in height and the SRTM  has a huge Z-offset. That is – You can not really use this data for anything practical. But it looks good and is FUN to play with in FME.

The zip-file (covering an area in Lund/Sweden) is about 11 Mb and contains 1-5.LAS files that can be viewed in the FME Data Inspector.

Even if the data is “fake” extruded with “random” heights from OpenStreetMap it looks pretty.

I will try to produce some more Li(E)DAR in the future. Feel free to request an area.

/FME Rox

Ulf Mansson (Ulf Månsson)
Twitter: @ulfme

In short it’s a map with a simple user-interface to generate a Workspace for FME. The workspace is setup to extract OSM-data with the current bounding-box. (You can read more in the instructions).

I was quite surprised to see that it’s used a lot. The below picture indicates where FME workspaces have been generated to extract OSM-data in the middle of Europe:

The map was generated by FME by parsing the Web-server logs. (Quite easy to do).

/Regards

Ulf Mansson (Ulf Månsson)
Twitter: @ulfme