Open Street Map is the data source that keeps on giving. Most recently, the latest release has been a dump of GPS data from its contributors. These are the track files from Sat Nav systems which they users have sourced for the raw data behind OSM.
It's a huge dataset: 55GB and 2.8bn items. And Guardian Datastore Flickr group user Steven Kay decided to try to visualise it.
This is the result - and it's only an random sample of the whole. The heatmap shows a random sample of 1% of the points and their distribution, to show where GPS is used to upload data to OSM.
There are just short of 2.8 billion points, so the sample is nearly 28 million points. Red cells have the most points, blue cells have the fewest.
Here's how he did it:
Points were given a geohash, and the first 3 characters of the geohash were used to bin the points into a regular grid.
Using a couple of python scripts, and tidied up the SVG in Inkscape. Geohashing code here.
You can see some interesting patterns:
- some europe-carribean flights/boat journeys
- flights from US west coast to NZ
- a hotspot over Germany, UK and central/eastern Europe
- an odd delineated band between 30N and 30S in the oceans - this may be a result of the sampling
We found it via our Flickr group - what can you post?
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