CASA Conference 8th - 9th January 2009

Yesterday was the first day of the first Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) conference at UCL.

The day was quite interesting, more of a showcase of what CASA have been up to. They continue to do some pretty nice looking stuff, a couple of the things that are worth looking at are the (GMapCreator) which is a super easy way to take data off your desktop and up onto the Web - and MapTube which is a website that allows you to take allsorts of different maps and mash them all together.

MapTube is a great resource, its very very simple to use and there are allsorts of bits of random data on there (from rate of teenage stabbings to how the whole of Britain is reacting to the credit crunch). You can basically grab whatever type of maps you want and mash-them-all-up. Of course this being the world of Web 2.0 users can upload their own maps and you can add KML feeds directly on.

It's certainly flashy, and the nice transparency controls allow you to easily pick out patterns between overlays. Mind you, I haven't used it for anything yet - and the data thats up there at the moment won't be particularly useful for my research - but good work CASA for putting more tools and applications out there for people to get hold of and develop. CASA of course being masters of publicity have got a few high-profile maps up on there (Radio 4 things, etc.) - which means that it has had a big whack of hits, which is great.

One of the other interesting things about the papers was Alex Singleton's thoughts on how sites like MapTube get adopted, in terms of public engagement. He said that whilst the press releases bring in a lot of traffic - there are real spikes in traffic after something gets blogged about on a popular blog, or enters the social networking sphere (gets Digg'd or Twittered, etc.). This creates a vast amount of immediate traffic, which is quite hard to deal with on the server side as its often unpredictable - sites being blogged about many months after initial release as people come across them.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing what the 2nd day brings.