About Me
I’m Oliver O’Brien, a researcher and software developer at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), an interdisciplinary research group at UCL in London. I’m part of the GENeSIS team, investigating and implementing new ways to visualise spatial data, including working with MapTube.
In the past I’ve analysed educational geodemographics, UK census data (see CensusProfiler) and London travel flows. I studied an MSc in GIS at City University London, before joining UCL’s Geography Department in 2008 and then moving to CASA.
I’m also a contributor to the OpenStreetMap project which aims to create a free Wikipedia-style map of the whole world. In my leisure time, I compete in orienteering races, and have organised several events including the City of London Orienteering Race.
Follow me on Twitter: @oobr
Some work and leisure projects, tools and visualisations are listed on my personal website.
11 thoughts on “About Me”
Hey –
Please forgive the intrusion – Love the cycle hire stats on your stunning website – just thought i would fire over an idea…
I particularly like the graphs showing the utilisation history of the bikes with the daily peaks and troughs – but it doesn’t capture the huge movement of bikes across the network.
My idea would be to group the bike stations into “inner” and “outer” london – e.g. zone 1 and outside zone 1, and then show the “available bikes” graph for each one (or stack the two onto one chart). I’m sure selecting the initial grouping might take a bit of work but it would be a great chart if you could show it – rather than just undulating between 3000 and 4000 the whole time you would see “inner” completely clear out from 6pm and flood into the outer stations….
Hoping I’ve peaked your curiosity/interest!
Kind regards,
Will
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Dear Oliver, we met briefly at the Sense and the City exhibition. What an inspiration. I’m keen to see whether some of your work might tie in with our development projects. Broadly speaking we’re doing similar things. Perhaps we could chat/ meet for coffee? All the best, Ben
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I discovered bike-0-meter recently.
Congralutations for this application…
When the data of the 40 cities were available via internet ?
Does the different citiies has to pay to transmit the uptodate information ?
In London, you have now 4 800 bikes but
the system was for 6 000 bikes….
1 200 bikes are misisng ????
michel benoit mbenoit56@hotmail.com
When started bike-0-meter with figures of 40 cities ?
London bought 6000 bikes but only 4800 bikes are installed 14 months after starting the system…
Michael – I think they bought 8000 bikes. Many of these are in storage, waiting for the scheme to expand – it’s expanding by around 50% next spring, going eastwards. The spares are also swapped out for broken bikes, a good ~3-4% get reported as “broken” each day (often for trivial things though) as it’s probably more efficient.
Re the Bike-o-meters, different cities have different ways of showing the data and different mechanisms of making it available, so each city’s data is collected in a different way. There are some projects to combine together such datasets, such as citybik.es and WATB.
Oliver,
Regarding these different mechanisms of different cities making data available, I wonder if you could elaborate on that a bit. I’m a graduate student at Columbia in New York doing a masters in Quantitative Methods, and I’m getting a little frustrated in my search for data. I’m not sure if I’m going about it the wrong way, emailing the authors of papers that have piqued my curiosity, but I’d be glad to have your advice.
cheers
Pedro – Some cities have formal APIs with documentation, some have API-like feeds (although undocumented) serving JSON/XML, and some just have a map where the HTML or Javascript needs to be scraped. A couple of the trickier ones require sending POSTs in order to get the data back.
Hi Oliver,
I compile the Infoporn pages in Wired magazine, UK. Would love to catch up and see what you’re up to at the moment. Cheers,
Dan Smith