Parks Listing Data Added to City of Vancouver's Open Data Site
Low, Linda
Nik Garkusha
I did a quick hack of the data using a great new set of Simile Exhibit widgets http://openhalton.ca/vancouverparks.htm
I’ve been experimenting with Exhibit after some great feedback from my Vancouver Council Expense experiment.
It’s a very early BETA.
Nik G
Finder:
http://openhalton.ca/vanpark/
This is the updated version of my earlier "hack" of the Park data,
adding Facility & Washroom information + filtering by different
Facility Types & Washroom Hours.
I adapted the SIMILE Exhibit framework (OSS MIT license) to
dynamically load JSON of the data at runtime; which can be useful for
visualizing/browsing/filtering future datasets from the city ;-)
On May 27, 12:08 am, Nik Garkusha <Nik.Garku...@microsoft.com> wrote:
> I did a quick hack of the data using a great new set of Simile Exhibit widgetshttp://openhalton.ca/vancouverparks.htm
Luke Closs
Nice design, and it seems very explorable. I didn't know there were
so many ultimate fields!
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Vancouver Data" group.
> To post to this group, send email to vancouv...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to vancouver-dat...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vancouver-data?hl=en.
>
>
Nik G
This should be pretty re-usable for other datasets that can benefit
from faceting/filtering. I've been exploring lightweight JS-based
frameworks for faceting + visualizing & pivoting data ever since James
McKinney's feedback on my Vancouver Council Expense PivotViewer,
The goal is to have a framework that can load/parse/visualize/filter
datasets on the fly.
Luke Closs
their website? :)
James McKinney
we could communicate size with the actual shape of the park rather
than bubbles. I'm not sure why the Stanley Park bubble is so small -
maybe a bug in Exhibit? It's curious that golf courses are counted as
parks, but none of UBC campus is.
Exhibit is pretty good at what it does, but it still requires
significant customization to make the app match the data. For example,
having an icon for each facility would improve usability (maybe laid
out across the top of the map?). Facets like "Washrooms?" should be
checkboxes. If you can get the boundaries for neighborhoods, I would
add them as a layer to the map (or even create my own tiles using
them).
I would also collapse or remove the facets for special features and
washroom hours. Washroom hours are mostly dawn to dusk. Except for
seawall, special features are unique, and it is not typically useful
to facet down to one result. Instead I would mention the general rule
for washroom hours in a blurb at the top, and mention the most
interesting special features there, too, with links that popup the
appropriate park. This liberates more room for other facets.
Nice work!
Cheers,
James
Mark, Jonathan
We (the City) have no information for UBC as it is not part of the City.
There is a ParkFinder app on the City Park Board site at
http://cfapp.vancouver.ca/parkfinder_wa/index.cfm?fuseaction=FAC.FacilitySearch, it appears to have some of the same functionality.
Jonathan
Herb Lainchbury
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Vancouver Data" group.
To post to this group, send email to vancouv...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to vancouver-dat...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vancouver-data?hl=en.
James McKinney
<jonath...@vancouver.ca> wrote:
> There is a boundary file for parks on Open Data, see http://data.vancouver.ca/datacatalogue/parks.htm.
>
> We (the City) have no information for UBC as it is not part of the City.
Cool! The polygon shapefile even has the boundaries for unnamed green
spaces. It would be nice if the shapefile's attribute list contained
the same data as the CSV or Excel files. That way, we would not have
to join two datasets.
Nik Garkusha @OpenHalton
just
because I'd like to arrive at a few "frameworks" that could be used to
rapidly visualize/navigate datasets as they become available -- you're
right
that at a certain point Simile Exhibit/Timeline/etc. start to get a
bit more
complex that I'd like them to be.
Couple of quick points: Stanley park is so large 400 hectares that it
falls
outside the range of "sizes" that I set for the map, and it defaults
to a
small bubble. I played around and found that in a map where relative
sizes
are represented by bubbles, having 1 very large data point makes all
other
bubbles look almost identical, where a .5 and 5 hectare parks look
exactly
the same....
Good point on the binary facets as checkboxes, it actually would be a
good
addition to Exhibit, let me check it out. I was particularly
interested in
washroom hours because there are quite a few that are not Dawn/Dusk
(and
those are summer hours)... but good point nevertheless. Perhaps a way
to
"hide" some facets, or a way to expand for "more..." facets.
Having shape data certainly makes it interesting. However, not sure
about
client-side processing of higher quality boundaries at runtime.
Perhaps a
server-side solution that would render tiles and serve them up would
be
better... will look into it.
Nik
Nik Garkusha @OpenHalton
James McKinney
will still render the layer very quickly. I assume it is simplifying
the polygons for each zoom-level. You can also simplify the polygons
yourself using QGIS for example and then restrict the zoom level so
that no one gets so close as to see any ugly simplifications. For
parks, you probably don't want to zoom all the way in or out (I often
accidentally use the scroll wheel while over a map when I intend to
scroll the page, and it's quite annoying to accidentally scroll out to
the entire world, when the map only deals with a city. Same for
zooming in to sub-block level. Better to restrict the zoom range.)
men...@vancouver.ca
Meng