The Netherlands from a new perspective

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A very interesting data visualisation project of all buildings of the Netherlands by developer Bert Spaan from Waag Society.

The data for this map are from the ‘Basisregistraties Adressen en Gebouwen’ (BAG). Dutch municipalities are delivering the basic information, the Dutch register, ‘the Kadaster’, administrates the data. If there are any mistakes of the data, people can report and omissions themselves at the Kadaster. By doing so, they contribute to the project and make it a crowdsourced map!

Read more: The Netherlands from a new perspective By Bert Spaan Waag Society , Ron Boonstra, September 02, 2013.

Journey Through Time by Swisstopo

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The most impressive accomplishment for a long-term preservation of geospatial data from Swisstopo

The main inspiration behind the UCIT was the Journey Through Time application by Swisstopo. The Swiss Federal Office of Topography has recently updated and extended the application.
The Journey Through Time part of it, is a combination of digitized maps from 1844 to today. The main purpose of the Swiss Government was to make geodata freely available to the public at no cost, using open source software.

Swiss cartography is renowned for its accuracy, quality and artistry and thankfully, they have produced a wonderful portal that allows you to explore the rich history of their work. Enjoy!

7000 people in one week!

Since the project is published on the national newspaper Der Standard, in one week more than 7000 unique visitors visited the website. 64% were spending more than 30sec. UCIT has received valuable reactions in a short time span and there are some open questions that I would like to answer here.

why did I not use Open Government Data in UCIT?

The answer is simple, there were no sufficient data that I could use which has certain uniformity and certain intervals such as 10 years. Principally I would of course support the open government data initiative. If there would be possible alternatives, I would be glad to replace it with the existing ones.

why use these particular data-set to show the urban change?

I am aware that the data is not fully suitable to show the transformation of the city. But you would be surprised how impossible that is to find an ideal data-set if you want to add time-space character to it. My long term wish would be to turn this data into a more appropriate version of it but now we have the possibility to use/analyse these data to make the most of it.

why the quality is that bad especially between 1910-1930?

it is simply because during that time these maps were produced with a lower scale (1:75.000). And if we think that these maps are mostly paper maps which have been lying in the drawers of an archive, it was an expected outcome that they have a certain limited quality.

what is so special about this application?

not so much! Here my purpose was to make urban data interesting to the media and public, just by creating an application which has a bit of an unconventional way of showing urban data, showing the City of Vienna from a different perspective. We need to re-examine the city and keep it open to further critical analysis and showing the urban data in a different way may lead to reveal unquestioned knowledge and creative thinking.

UCIT on net:25 Conference

The University of Vienna is celebrating its 650th Anniversary in 2015, the Vienna University of Technology has its 200th birthday, and 25 years ago the foundation of the Austrian Internet was laid at the University of Vienna. 650 Years of University of Vienna, 200 Years of Vienna University of Technology and 25 Years of Internet in Austria was celebrated on net:25 Conference  with the event-trilogy “net:future”, “net:science” and “net:art”.
UCIT was there on the second day which was dedicated to net:science and invited the national and international research community. ACOnet as the Austrian research and education network presented showcases how to use the network infrastructure for research purposes.

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