Kind: captions
Language: en
we all like maps with a lot of data
especially data that helps us with our
research or investigations or
visualizing a story
over the next few minutes i'm going to
show you how you can create your own
maps and how to get access to public
sources of location data so that you can
create customized maps on whatever you
want
for example
you could create something like this map
that you're seeing here on the screen
which is a map that i use for running
and exploring the city of london
all of those points that you're seeing
are public drinking fountains or public
toilets
and why would i not use google maps
because if we look at google maps there
are significantly less locations
available for these points
other examples include using publicly
available data to create a map of
locations of cctv cameras in munich
germany
or gas wells in queensland in australia
so sit tight and get ready for another
visual tutorial
[Music]
hi everyone welcome back to this series
on how to do open source investigations
from home i'm ben and this is part 10 so
let's get started
[Music]
this is a water drinking fountain in the
heart of london right near st paul's
cathedral
which you might have seen in some of the
other videos i've done on geolocation
hey guys
i do a lot of running through london
and especially on long runs i need to
find a place to fill up my water supply
but also places like toilets for example
and when i look on google maps on london
there's not really that many places
where i can fill up a water bottle i see
some scattered here and there but not as
many as i'd like and definitely not for
toilets as well so what i've done is
i've gone ahead and created my own map
using open source data
to first of all identify all of the
water sites in london
as well as all of the public toilets
because when you've got to go you've got
to go and what i'm going to show you
over the next few minutes is how you can
use something really easy like overpass
to collect all of the data that's on osm
maps and create your own customized map
and layer that in google earth or in
something easy like map hub to use for
yourself your friends or the community
that you're in
this is especially helpful if you're
doing a lot of database investigations
or research or anything like that where
visualizing maps and data is crucial to
your research
most of the information you find on a
map for example like google maps is just
lots of little data entry points but
google maps doesn't show us everything
it only shows us the things that
maybe are necessary for applications or
are necessary or popular for travel
and places to visit
there's a lot more information on a map
than just what you'll find on google
maps and we can have a look at some more
mapped data
by using something called overpass turbo
which is a favorite side of mine
to open up our field of vision when
we're looking at data on maps
overpass turbo is really quite easy to
use you don't need to be a coder but if
you if you can write anything you can
just do it in the left box over here
for those of you that want something
simple and something that i always use a
lot it's just the wizard setting over
here
so let's have a look for example and see
what we can type in what i'm going to do
is i'm going to run a search for
drinking water in london because for me
that's something that i'm often looking
for when i'm out on a long run or when i
do long walks through london
drinking water is actually classified as
an amenity
which is a category that osm data users
or openstreetmap data uses you can see
here in the example on overpass turbo
they have highway or tourism
if you want to look at more of those you
can have a look through the osm wiki
and we can have a look at what's in the
amenities category
you can see that there's 219 pages in
amenities
which just goes to show you how much
information is in osm data
be mindful that this is just one
category which is amenities
all of these things we can search for
police stations polling stations post
boxes wineries workshops you name it
they've probably got it
for us we're going to look for water so
if i do a little control f on here
we have water points water or drinking
water
i'm going to keep this one simple as a
little example and stick with drinking
water for now
i can pop that into my query wizard
what i'm going to do is search for
amenity
which is the
one for drinking water
in london
i'm going to build and run that query
and on the left you'll see the auto text
that the wizard has popped in there for
me which is quite useful i don't have to
type out that stuff it's just done it
automatically which is why i like to use
the wizard setting
what's what it's doing right now is
processing that query it'll pull that
data
and it'll map it out for us
so now we have all of the amenities
which are the drinking water points in
the city of london and we can see that
there's quite a few which is really
helpful
what i like to do is to add a bit of
color to them
so just for the purpose of this to make
sure that these are quite visible for
everyone i'm going to add a little text
in here and don't worry if you're
feeling left behind with this i'll also
copy and paste the exact text that i use
in the description below
i'm going to run this and let's see what
these little points look like on my map
cool
so here's my little data points that i
have for all of the
water drinking locations or fountains in
the city of london this is really
helpful for me because before while
running i just used to fill up my water
wherever i could see
a water fountain but now i can actually
use this map the best thing about this
overpass turbo is that it lets you
export the data in a lot of different
variables so you could export it as a
geo json format a gpx raw osm data for
the purpose of this one and because
we've been using google earth for the
past few sessions i'm going to download
this as a kml
this simply exports the file as a kml
that we can open up in our favorite
little google earth if you're stuck on
how to upload a kml into google earth
all you need to do is drag the file
and you can see i'm dragging the file
and just drag it into a folder or
wherever you have it on the left side
under the places tab on the left in
google earth here
and what that'll do is automatically
load all of those pins right there
and we can even see that some of the
names have come through and all of the
other data will come through these so
for example if there's an image attached
let's click on that image and see what
happens cool we've even got a little
image of that one
we have some names sometimes they'll
have opening times or things like that
we'll probably see a lot more
information with the toilets as well
because i want to keep these pins
colored i might just change the style of
these
that's also very easy to do so if you
want to change the style of your pins in
google earth
you can just right click on them
and get info and you want to go to style
and color and share the style of these
pins
so i might choose a nice blue pin for
these
so when i go for runs the other thing
i'm often looking for when i stop
is a toilet as well
and i'm going to do the exact same
search function again but rather than
looking for
the amenity of drinking water
i'm going to look for toilets so let's
first of all see
if we have yep
we've got toilets over here tag amenity
toilets
so i'm going to do the exact same search
function here and i'm going to look for
amenity toilets
in london
i'm going to build that query
and you can see it does take a little
bit of time to pull out the data but
eventually it does get it great so now i
have the location of all of the toilets
in london and you can see that actually
if we do this search in google
maps
so if i go
london
public toilets
see how many pins pop up on my map when
i search for public toilets in london
now these might be ones with reviews
maybe some of the ones that i've pulled
up on here are closed
but there's definitely a lot more here
than there are here and you can start to
get an understanding of how useful that
might be
if you're looking for things such as
for example cctv cameras
bank machines power lines whatever
you're sort of looking for whether it be
for geolocation or data or any form of
research you can see that you can get a
lot more pins through this osm data so
what i'm going to do is export these
again same process and i'm going to go
back to my google earth and same process
again drag into the folder
and we can now see that we've got our
toilets displayed
what i'm going to do is again do the
same thing to share
that style
and display them like so
so now we can see our toilets are here
and this is actually quite useful
because now i can identify specific
spots that i might want to stop at on my
runs
for example i might want to go to
trafalgar square here
where we have toilets on the left
these are the opening times monday to
sunday 10 am to 8 pm
and we also have
a water site over here and that's quite
useful now there's a number of ways to
share this data with other people which
is something i really like doing is
sharing data with others
so what i'm going to show you now
is the benefit of using something like
for example maphub all you can do is
import any of these so you remember in
the overpass where we had export
we can export as geojson gpx or kml
and you can import those same types of
files
and you can separate those with either
icons or colors just like i've done for
google earth
and this is a really useful way to share
a map with a friend that might also be
running through london and
in need of regular toilet spots or
regular water spots
as well as any other sorts of research
you're doing so whether you're working
in a team and you want to share a map
with the entire team
and keep that as a login only map
so keeping it private and secure
or whether you want to share it with the
world with the research that you do on
mapping things like
arms destinations or geolocation or
things like that
map hub is quite useful for that
if you're wondering why this might be
useful to your research well the data
points are not just only water drinking
spots and public toilets in london
there is a lot of data when it comes to
open street maps for example we could
have a look at
man-made objects such as petroleum wells
or we could have a look at surveillance
like cctv cameras
so for example using overpass turbo
here is the data points of cctv cameras
that i've just quickly collected i've
exported that to google earth here so we
have a nice little list of cctv cameras
it's always good to verify your data
sources as well
to make sure that these are actually
correct
if we wanted to do that for example i
could maybe drive up one of these
streets using google street view
and see if actually this is the case
where there are cctv cameras and of
course if we have a look at this
building here where there were lots of
pins we can see there's one there
one there seems to be one on the end of
that building and quite a few on the
side of that building
along that car park there all the way
along that street as well
other subjects could be for example
power lines are very interesting to look
at bridges
different things if you're looking for
geolocating a specific image with a
power line in the background or a cctv
camera
but also if you're interested in doing
uh resource research so petroleum wells
in australia
here is one uh that i've collected
before
which has a look at petroleum well
specifically in queensland
and we can see
quite an amazing
data set of geographical points or
geodata as i like to call it of
petroleum wells in queensland
and you can see a lot of these on the
ground just from that sort of cut out
there and the little well site where it
would have been etched into the
landscape
maybe some of these pins are in
locations where there are not currently
wells maybe there might be new ones or
maybe some of these might be destroyed
and so they're a little bit old so again
there are always limitations to geodata
it's good to recognize that
but these things are quite useful for
different fields and different
industries in research
i hope you found this tutorial helpful
especially if you are a runner through
london or any other city in the world
and you want to make your own map of
drinking spots and possible toilets or
cafes even
but please do leave a comment and tell
me if you've used your own map for
something else or if you've created
another data visualization using maps or
google earth or anything like that
and please share this with anyone else
that might find this tutorial useful and
that enjoys maps as much as
you me and the other people that watch
this channel do
[Music]