Articles tagged with visualization tag
Recently I’ve bought a book called Maps by Aleksandra Mizielinska and Daniel Mizielinski to my nephew. The book’s absolutely wonderful and made me want to try crafting a map with similar looks. I don’t do maps much at CleverMaps, so this was a great opportunity to find out what new features became available during the last months of QGIS development.
Result
A map of North America in scale of 1:22,000,000 featuring the biggest lakes, rivers, mountain ranges and basic administrative units for the North American countries. I aimed for visually appealing overview map rather than perfectly correct topographic one.
Data
I used my beloved Natural Earth dataset for both cultural (boundaries, cities) and physical (rivers, lakes) map features. Different scales came to play for different map layers as they seemed a bit too/few simplified for the given scale.
Fonts
I usually use built-in system fonts (Ubuntu Condensed or such), but this kind of map needed a more handwritten looking, sort of childish font. After searching dafont.com I chose PreCursive by RaseOne Full Time Artists and KG Primary Penmanship by Kimberly Geswein.
Symbols
The mountain point symbol was one of the two custom symbols used on the map. It comes from BSGStudio. The ocean wave symbol was made by myself.
QGIS effects
I’ve used several techniques I find interesting enough to be listed here.
Coastlines
For a long time I’ve considered coastlines a field for cartographic invention. They can be emphasized by shading or 3D effects. I chose the set of four parallel coastlines subtly disappearing into the sea, hopefully invoking the feeling of waves coming to the shore.
It’s done by dissolving all the features and buffering them again and again.
Buffered labels
Buffered labels are usually hard to get right, because they fill so much space if the buffer color’s not corresponding to its surroundings. But choosing the proper color can be a real struggle at times.
On this map, almost all the labels are buffered with the color of its surroundings, which makes them more legible, yet not too expressive. This is possible thanks to QGIS expression based properties that let you define unique styling to different map features.
Where it isn’t possible (e.g. Bahamas or Honduras) to choose just one buffer color, the label is not buffered at all (or the semi-transparent white buffer is used).
Note the Rocky Mountains label is split on the borders of the U.S.A. and Canada and its both parts match the background color.
Tapered rivers
Rivers are tapered based on the Natural Earth’s width attribute value for each river segment.
Labels in separate layers
I’m used to put labels into separate layers in more complicated map compositions, especially when you need to draw label along path for areal features (such as countries or states).
It becomes a bit harder to keep the features in sync with the labels though. I’d like to use only one layer for all the map layers in the future, as I feel that’s the way to go for the best labeling.
Labels wrapped on character
Some labels just can’t fit the feature they belong to and QGIS lets you deal with this by wrapping labels on a special character, \ in my case.
Layer blending mode
The mechanics behind layer blending modes are still a mystery to me, but they can add that little extra to a map very easily. Thanks to the Overlay blending mode, the Rocky Mountains may remain very subtle on different kinds of background.
Wifileaks is a project by Jakub Čížek aimed to map the Czech wi-fi networks with Android/iOS app. The data gathered by people using the app is available to download and features ~ 90,000,000 records, each representing the position of the cellphone when connecting to the network. Just about perfect to craft some maps!
Using PostgreSQL cstore_fdw
I ran out of disk space immediately after loading the dataset into the PostgreSQL database. After fiddling around I remembered that columnar store should be a bit space-friendlier than the old fashioned relational database. Thus, I installed the cstore_fdw by Citus Data in just few steps.
sudo apt install libprotobuf-c-dev libprotobuf-c1 protobuf-c-compiler postgresql-server-dev-9.6
git clone [email protected]:citusdata/cstore_fdw.git
PATH=/usr/bin/:$PATH make
PATH=/usr/bin/:$PATH make install
# when the cstore_fdw installation finishes, add the following line to your postgresql.conf and restart the database cluster
shared_preload_libraries = 'cstore_fdw'
This makes another FDW available to you inside the PostgreSQL. The actual foreign server has to be created before loading the data into a foreign table.
cat <<END | psql -qAt --no-psqlrc
CREATE SERVER cstore_server FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER cstore_fdw;
CREATE SCHEMA data_cstore;
CREATE FOREIGN TABLE data_cstore.wifi (
id integer,
mac text,
ssid text,
signal_strength numeric,
security integer,
lat numeric,
lon numeric,
alt numeric,
unixtime bigint,
filename text
)
SERVER cstore_server
OPTIONS (compression 'pglz');
END
The foreign table is 3× smaller than it’s standard counterpart. However, this comes with some costs:
- neither
UPDATE nor DELETE can be used
- no
CREATE INDEX
- no
SERIAL
To overcome these shortcomings I used COPY statement to spit out the slightly modified table and immediately loaded it back in.
cat <<END | psql -qAt --no-psqlrc
COPY (
SELECT
row_number() OVER (),
mac,
ssid,
signal_strength,
security,
split_part(filename, '_', 2)::integer,
to_timestamp(unixtime),
ST_Transform(ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(lon, lat, alt), 4326), 32633)
FROM data_cstore.wifi
WHERE lon BETWEEN 0 AND 20
AND lat BETWEEN 18 AND 84
) TO '/tmp/wifileaks.db' WITH CSV DELIMITER ';'
DROP SCHEMA IF EXISTS data_cstore CASCADE;
DROP SCHEMA data_cstore;
CREATE SCHEMA data_cstore;
CREATE FOREIGN TABLE data_cstore.wifi (
id integer,
mac text,
ssid text,
signal_strength numeric,
security integer,
userid integer,
unixtime timestamp without time zone,
geom geometry(POINTZ, 32633)
)
SERVER cstore_server
OPTIONS (compression 'pglz');
END
Putting the networks on the map
As mentioned, each row of data represents the cellphone’s location when connecting to a wi-fi network. To get real wi-fi transmitter position, I calculated the average of location of each cellphone ever connected (although the signal strength should be taken into account here as well).
CREATE UNLOGGED TABLE data_cstore.wifi_avg_loc AS
SELECT
row_number() OVER () id,
mac,
ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(x, y), 32633) geom
FROM (
SELECT
mac,
AVG(ST_X(geom)) x,
AVG(ST_Y(geom)) y
FROM data_cstore.wifi_loc
GROUP BY 1
) a;
I’ve been sort of living in Brno for the last 7 years (college included). It’s quite a hilly city, with lots of cars, very good public transportation system and ever-improving cycling infrastructure. All these years I was using trams, buses and trolleybuses to get myself from one place to another.
These are all great, because:
- you can read while you ride
- you are generally faster than car during rush hour
- you don’t waste your time trying to park your car
These all suck, because:
- public transportation is quite expensive in Brno
- people stink in summer
- some people stink in winter as well
- you usually have to change several lines to actually get where you want
- they’re crowded
My period card expired on March 8 and I decided not to renew it. Why? See the list above. As I don’t have a car and I work at the far end of the city, I can either ride a bike or run to work. Ask me how it’s been for the first month? Not bad at all.
Figure: March Strava log.
Figure: April Strava log.
What’s so great about commuting?
Not so long ago I considered commuting a waste of time. It took me 40-50 minutes to get to work and about the same to get back home. That’s 1-2 hours not being productive, not doing anything at all actually, just changing places.
That’s a terrible mistake to do. It’s much better to see this time as an opportunity to do that little extra for yourself - walk, run, ride. Even though it takes me a bit longer than public transport (showering and dressing included), it leaves me with totally different state of mind in the end - it just starts me up (hello Rolling Stones).
You can go for a ride right from work. That’s priceless.
As a by-product I started to care more about what I eat and when I eat it. I actually spend time cooking so I get enough food during the day. Something I didn’t do before, because you can always buy something sweet before the bus comes, right?
Figure: Daily commute in Brno: bike in pink, run in green. See the full version.
What’s not so great about commuting?
Weather, especially in spring and autumn, often sucks. Sometimes I come to work soaking wet, nothing a hot shower wouldn’t fix though. Someone still needs to clean the bike…
Traffic sucks in the evening. I get up before six, leave home before half past six, thus avoid heavy traffic. Riding a bike home in the evening is threatening sometimes and a bit of mutual respect between pedestrians, cyclists and drivers would do.
Cycling paths sometimes end right before the big crossroads. Often drivers use parts of the network as parking lanes, which puts you in danger suddenly.
Other cyclists, skaters, people walking their dogs, little kids usually don’t care about you at all. You better don’t get distracted if you want to get home safe and sound.
Books are hard to read on the bike.
Does it tell you something about your city?
I guess the city you see on foot or from atop a saddle is completely different than the one seen from a bus or a car.
Is it rather car or bike friendly? Do you feel at risk riding a bike or running? Is it faster to run/ride or drive? Does your city actually want you to leave your car at home at all, or has it been designed for cars?
River seems to be blessing when your city has one (unless flood strikes, different story). If done right, its shores might become one of the most beautiful parts of the city. Something Brno needs to catch up with other cities.
I hope one day I’ll get up and see Brno changing in front of me. Just like Paris is right now. We all die in the end, so why not to take a walk before we do?
Liftago (the Czech analogy of Uber) has recently released a sample of its data covering four weeks of driver/pasenger interactions.
Have a look at my infographics created with PostGIS, Inkscape, Python and pygal.
