BBC’s ‘Britain from above’ - Mashing-up the UK
Monday, August 4th, 2008There was a trailer shown as the last story on the BBC One 10 o’clock news last night for a new TV series starting next week called ‘Britain From Above‘. There is a news story introducing it online where you can watch a few clips. The series starts at 9pm on BBC1 on Sunday 10th August 2008, and will be available in HD.
The series will be presented by Andrew Marr and shows how our lives work and interconnect using some pretty neat visualisations. A simple way to describe them was mashing up data from our lives onto some high powered maps. The examples they showed included:
- A dataset from all of the telephone exchanges in the UK showing the sources of phone calls made in one day, plotted over time onto a map of the UK. Once animated it allows you to see how the country wakes up, runs through the day, then quieten downs again at night.
- A map showing flight paths of all flights in the UK, running down the air corridors, and stacking up before landing.
- A visualisation of the shipping traffic passing through the Strait of Dover.
- A map of London showing the routes taken by a selected group of cabbies, and how it changes when the road get busy, using their local knowledge to find different routes.
I’d love to get my hands on some datasets like this and mess around!