geolocation + open data = awwesome

Coming across our desk via tweet from Sir Time Berneers Lee: an amazing (if not amazing looking) google maps based data mashup showing marine traffic throughout the world. That is to say, Real Time (not really but close) data showing position, speed and heading for ships throut the worlds major shipping lanes. The Mashup runs on top of a big open data set hosted by the Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering, University of the Aegean, Greece. More information about the project can be found at the open dot dot dot blog. Anyway go check it out.

One funny thing, it shows traffic on canals and rivers, so when you first look at the map you may wonder why there are forty boats in Missouri.

Jer’s blog blprnt landed in my inbox this morning via google alert. He’s put together a pretty cool visualization in Processing by mining Twitter for the phrase “Just Landed” and then parsing out the location the tweeter had just landed in, along with the home location listed in their twitter profile. There are some problems with the assumptions made in the data collection process but, whatever. If Jer wants the science to be perfect than he’ll figure that out on his own.

The results of all that mining and processing look like this:

Awesome. Find out more about his methodology and check out some animation here.