Open Street Map GPS users mapped
From the post:
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.
Great data set on its own but possibly the foundation for something even more interesting.
The intelligence types, who can’t analyze a small haystack effectively, want to build a bigger one: Building a Bigger Haystack.
Why not use GPS data such as this to create an “Intelligence Big Data Mining Test?” That is we assign significance to patterns in the data and see of the intelligence side can come up with the same answers. We can tell them what the answers are because they must still demonstrate how they got there, not just the answer.