# Any GIS (Geographic Information Systems) people on here?



## Mapped (Oct 13, 2011)

Geography has always been important to me in education and work. I did an undergrad degree in geography and In a previous employment I was a bit of a self taught practitioner doing socio-economic and planning and land use mapping. I'm currently doing an MSc in GIS to learn more and get my practical skills up.

Today I got a project proposal at work that chimed well with my dissertation topic (I can't tell anyone what it is at the moment due to funding issues) and it seems like the discipline is cranking up a notch due to all the new technical possibilities.

I was just wondering if there were any like minds on here working on anything interesting geographic that they can share? I promise to share my ideas when I can as well  Might not be until April though


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## lizzieloo (Oct 13, 2011)

*subscribes*


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## baldrick (Oct 13, 2011)

i am very interested in all this kind of stuff but I know almost nothing 

I did a training course for Cartology and it was fab, but then never used it in my job enough to build up a level of expertise, other things took precedence because there was already a mapping bod in our building.  But I still think it would have been massively valuable for us, a lot of what I do is demographics data and being able to represent visually some quite dry stats to people who have an allergy to numbers would be fantastic.  We produce a lot of data that never gets looked at until Ofsted come calling because the services we support don't understand it.

It would be quite basic stuff, but I had all kinds of ideas about how we could have done it.  Our services would have loved it.  *I* would have loved it.  Have just spent a number of days talking about boundaries for the new model of service with a colleague in another department and drawing on the BIGGEST map I have ever seen with highlighters.  It was awesome.

I *heart* maps.


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## Epona (Oct 14, 2011)

I used GIS a little bit when I worked in animal health/epidemiology to track spread of a particular disease outbreak and map quarantine areas - very very long time ago mind you so I won't be able to contribute anything useful, but it is something I find interesting so will keep my eye on this thread.


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## toblerone3 (Oct 14, 2011)

Short of doing a Masters in GIS which I can't afford. Are there any other training courses packages which can be used to build up a smattering of GIS?  Or are there any good introductory textbooks which you could recommend?


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

I haven't got the right head on for this thread today, but I'll be thinking GIS on Monday so will have input and suggestions for the thread then. It's exiting times in this line of work


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## Puddy_Tat (Oct 16, 2011)

I have used GIS stuff to some extent - mainly for public transport information, and have recently done some playing with Google Maps for a history trail.  Not currently working on anything though.

I may be stating the bleeding obvious, but have you met the Mapping London Blog?


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

Yeah I've seen that ta 

This shit's cool too:

http://blogs.casa.ucl.ac.uk/


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## Puddy_Tat (Oct 16, 2011)

ooo.  might peruse tomorrow.

Also, don't know if you have met ITO - they do fancy things with maps and data and so on.  A fair bit of their stuff is behind logins, but there's a few samples on their public website.


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

Ohhh not seen that. Ta 

Will look tomorrow when my brain works


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## Puddy_Tat (Oct 16, 2011)

and have you got into the realms of psychogeography?  It's something I've tried and so far failed to get the hang of...


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

Puddy_Tat said:


> and have you got into the realms of psychogeography? It's something I've tried and so far failed to get the hang of...



Yeah. Did a bit at uni and loved it. I have some plans to produce bottom up crowdsourced products for that field. It's still very early days yet!


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

Not strictly GIS, but I love this blog 

http://flowingdata.com/


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## Puddy_Tat (Oct 16, 2011)

Tweetures?


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

There's some proper thinking ouside the box on that site. Data viz seems to be where it's at


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

Right I'll dig an old old project and share. Probably blows my cover on here, but I'm caring less by the day 

London land use and development sites. you need to register to get full funtionality

http://www.londonbrownfieldsites.org/Mapping/

And another used on the platform we developed

http://www.londonheatmap.org.uk/Mapping/


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

Also the londonprofiler is worth a shufty if you are intereted

http://www.londonprofiler.org/

And this neat serivvice for sharing your creations

http://www.maptube.org/

These aren't mine by the way but are from UCL

Any others?


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## TruXta (Oct 16, 2011)

Christian Nold has done some interesting stuff. http://www.softhook.com/


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

TruXta said:


> Christian Nold has done some interesting stuff. http://www.softhook.com/



Looks amazing! I'm coming back to that with a clear head


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

...


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

baldrick said:


> i am very interested in all this kind of stuff but I know almost nothing
> 
> I did a training course for Cartology and it was fab, but then never used it in my job enough to build up a level of expertise, other things took precedence because there was already a mapping bod in our building. But I still think it would have been massively valuable for us, a lot of what I do is demographics data and being able to represent visually some quite dry stats to people who have an allergy to numbers would be fantastic. We produce a lot of data that never gets looked at until Ofsted come calling because the services we support don't understand it.
> 
> ...



Do you work for an LEA? School? FE college? I did loads of maps for Ofstead Area Wide Inspections back in the day and also this nightmare of a project http://readingroom.lsc.gov.uk/pre2005/quality/reshaping/circular0306-strategic-area-reviews.pdf

Education data was my life.

If you need any ideas or help for education data or mapping. I'm open for a chat.

Also highlighter pens on paper! It's 2011 

If cartology is still your field I know people in that area too, although there's massive crossover with GIS now.

PM if you want a detailed conversation


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

toblerone3 said:


> Short of doing a Masters in GIS which I can't afford. Are there any other training courses packages which can be used to build up a smattering of GIS? Or are there any good introductory textbooks which you could recommend?



There are courses and I do know some books. Do you have any training budget, funding through work? In HE? Although if I can get enough people together I may be able to cobble together a cheap or free day myself. PM me with your line of work and goals and I can think about books and courses etc.


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## ChrisD (Oct 16, 2011)

I'm interested...  I work as an Architect/Town Planner. Self employed so can't afford fancy GIS programmes. Use Autocad & Promap on a daily basis


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## baldrick (Oct 16, 2011)

N1 Buoy said:


> Do you work for an LEA? School? FE college? I did loads of maps for Ofstead Area Wide Inspections back in the day and also this nightmare of a project http://readingroom.lsc.gov.uk/pre2005/quality/reshaping/circular0306-strategic-area-reviews.pdf
> 
> Education data was my life.
> 
> ...


I work for Birmingham City Council doing data analysis.  Yeah, like I say I think we could be doing a lot more to visually represent trends in data, but the resources in terms of staff time just aren't there.

Anyway, yeah I agree about the paper and pens, but do you know how big Birmingham is?  It is a lot easier to rough things out on paper first!  This is what I've been working on: http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite/newmodel?packedargs=website=4&rendermode=live

And this is kind of stuff I would want to be doing, time permitting:
http://undertheraedar.blogspot.com/2010/07/nearest-neighbour-index-of-multiple.html

I actually emailed the guy who did this and he sent me the PDFs


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

Baldrick re the IMD stuff. Open up this one http://www.londonbrownfieldsites.org/Mapping/

Register for an account and see what I did with it lol

If you aren't getting a response from the registration then let me know. I think there may be a slight problem with that


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## lizzieloo (Oct 16, 2011)

Jesus, that's a lot of links to catch up on


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## Mapped (Oct 16, 2011)

Right with that brownfield sites it requires an admin to approve users. I'll get them on the case tomorrow. In the meantime here's what a shot of one of the IMD 2007 layers on top of the sites looks like







You can add transport, environmental layers and loads more when you have a log in and you can export jpegs pdfs etc. This image has been cropped to get rid of all my personal info. The data is in there for all of London


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## baldrick (Oct 16, 2011)

I need to have a proper look at all this.  I will see what I can dig up when I'm back at work.


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## Mapped (Oct 17, 2011)

If anyone's having problems getting into the good bits of the brownfield or heat map. Please let me know. I think I've tracked down the admin and we'll get it sorted


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## Mapped (Oct 17, 2011)

Right approvals should be dished out for anyone who wants to register for the brownfield site

www.londonbrownfieldsites.org/Mapping/

With the heat map one and the brownfield please register as STANDARD users as ticking authorised will cause headaches with the crew that are running it

http://www.londonheatmap.org.uk/Content/home.aspx


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## jay1978 (Oct 17, 2011)

i taught myself how to use automap 3d, GIS programme for a job interview. you can download a 2012 30 day trial version on TPB  which works great and has lots of tutorials, explains enough if you need to blag it. probabaly helps if you have an autocad background, but it's fairly self explanatory


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## Mapped (Oct 18, 2011)

N1 Buoy said:


> Right approvals should be dished out for anyone who wants to register for the brownfield site
> 
> www.londonbrownfieldsites.org/Mapping/
> 
> ...



Anyone got an opinion on this stuff? I'm meeting with the guys that are looking after it next week and it would be good to have some outside perspectives, especially from those with an interest in planning


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## Mapped (Oct 27, 2011)

Tobelerone3 and I had an off-line discussion about GIS last week and it looks as though it can be quite tough for people without resources and access to expensive software to get into it.

I had a quick chat with my uni tutor this afternoon and he mentioned this free open source GIS package that is supposed to be quite good

http://www.qgis.org/

Tobelerone and I also talked about putting together a basic web GIS/Mapping guide, basically google maps apps and resources, for people with low GIS knowledge and limited resources. So if you know of any good free websites (or any other guides) for kml creation, storage, display etc. for any discipline then it would be good to know about.

Things I was thinking of including are along the lines of this type of thing. Although I've got to research the creating and editing side of things properly as I normally use ArcGIS

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/software/gmapcreator.asp this creates a kml out of an esri shape file (not ideal as we want to bypass ESRI stuff)
http://www.maptube.org/ kml storage and display


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## toblerone3 (Oct 27, 2011)

Finally managed to embed a Google Maps walking route map into a Wordpress.com blog.  All sorts of weird stuff going on with Google Earth, Google Chrome, Google maps and Wordpress compatability issues.  Google Maps doesn't seem to get on very well with Google Chrome.

Even doing some really simple with GIS has many potential pitfalls I have found. But a little bit of success Yay!

http://greateridgeway.wordpress.com/

Thanks N1 will be looking at some of those links later on.  It was also good to get my head around some of this stuff even to the extent that I was able to throw a few buzzwords into the fray in a job interview I had this week.  Would have really been floudering without this.


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## Mapped (Oct 27, 2011)

You've done very well for only being at it a week  Next thing is geotagging those photos to add to the map, you might need a smart phone or camera to do that easily though.

See what you think of that quantum GIS package. If you get your head around that it will make making the kml files a breeze.

Hope the interview went well


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## Mapped (Oct 27, 2011)

toblerone3 said:


> Even doing some really simple with GIS has many potential pitfalls I have found. But a little bit of success Yay!
> 
> http://greateridgeway.wordpress.com/



How did you create that KML? It looks hand drawn to me i.e. didn't come from a GPS device


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## toblerone3 (Oct 27, 2011)

It was hand drawn in Google Earth from my memory of which particular field boundaries we walked along and referring closely to OS 1:25,000 maps.  Then imported the KML into Google Maps.

I would love to be able to use GPS for this whether that would be a stand-alone GPS or a mobile phone app.  Still a little backward in the technology department here in Toblerone Towers.


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## toblerone3 (Oct 28, 2011)

Just googled "social enterprise" and "GIS". A UCL page came up.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1007/10070101


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## soundsystem (Oct 30, 2011)

I work for one of the gas distribution networks, planning replacement jobs. When I was still a temp admin assistant I got to play around with ArcGIS a bit, really took to it and found out ways to do all sorts of useful things that the company had never really explored before. It's a big part of my job now, using GIS to analyse leakage statistics and developing better ways of doing things using it.

It's impressive technology but I get the impression that a lot of organisations aren't really using it to its full potential.


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## soundsystem (Oct 30, 2011)

Hey thanks for the likes  I hardly ever post but I've been lurking for years!


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## Mapped (Nov 16, 2012)

Resurrecting this for 2 reasons

1. I've to build part of a training course next year for people who want to use data spatially, but have no GIS experience or tools. 
2. I've got to get my Msc finished and one of the proposed outputs I'm looking at is with the tools and data will al be open source and free

This means using:

Quantum GIS: http://www.qgis.org/
open layers: http://openlayers.org/
Google maps API: https://developers.google.com/maps/
OS Open data: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/os-opendata.html
PostGis for postgresql: http://postgis.refractions.net/

Basically what I'm hoping to do is my research project and also write a guide on how someone with no budget (apart from PC and web hosting) and no support from an academic institution can go about creating some sophisticated GIS apps for little cost. It's the PostGIS/openlayers interaction that will take the most time for me to learn.

Has anyone got any thoughts on those ideas, used QGIS before, or have any other recent  GIS related developments to share?


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## Mapped (Nov 16, 2012)

Oh and I forgot to add open streetmap to that list, might even go to this, which is a bit geeky for a weekend http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/London_OPC2012


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## Mapped (Nov 17, 2012)

Definitely going this open source guide now I see there's no proper ESRI ArcGIS for Mac OSx


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## weltweit (Nov 17, 2012)

I work in sales. I tried to get all GIS on my contacts database & tried to plot out all our customers and contacts on a UK postcode map, then cross reference this against the amount of industry in each postcode district. Unfortunately I could not get the puter to do this so I had to manually write on the map. It was an interesting exercise though and told us where we were getting very little of the available business so it helped target our sales efforts.


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## soundsystem (Nov 17, 2012)

MapWindow Open Source GIS was mentioned recently where I work (http://www.mapwindow.org/), seems a bit more straightforward than qgis but maybe not as many geoprocessing tools available as ArcGIS, although I'm told you can write your own...


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## paolo (Nov 17, 2012)

I've had a dabble with GIS over the years - really enjoyed it.

Seperate from work, I do hand crafted thing. Not as cool as programmatic, but fun:

www.glastoearth.com


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## Mapped (Nov 17, 2012)

Did you try using http://www.google.com/drive/start/apps.html ?

You can upload a spreadsheet on that containing postcodes and it will geocode the postcodes into points for you. You can also do stuff with postcode area polygons in google maps.


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## Mapped (Nov 17, 2012)

paolo said:


> I've had a dabble with GIS over the years - really enjoyed it.
> 
> Seperate from work, I do hand crafted thing. Not as cool as programmatic, but fun:
> 
> www.glastoearth.com


 
I've seen your work on that paolo  and to do that it needs to be hand crafted or otherwise you'd have to wander around about the festival with GPS handsets taking readings


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## Mapped (Nov 17, 2012)

soundsystem said:


> MapWindow Open Source GIS was mentioned recently where I work (http://www.mapwindow.org/), seems a bit more straightforward than qgis but maybe not as many geoprocessing tools available as ArcGIS, although I'm told you can write your own...


 
I'll look into this, cheers


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## paolo (Nov 17, 2012)

N1 Buoy said:


> I've seen your work on that paolo   and to do that it needs to be hand crafted or otherwise wandering about the festival with GPS handsets.



Maybe one day I'll bend their ear about a survey team


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## Mapped (Nov 17, 2012)

paolo said:


> Maybe one day I'll bend their ear about a survey team


 
If you do can I get in on that blag?  I'm proper skilled in that area, and I'm sick of standing on top of the ribbon tower


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## weltweit (Nov 17, 2012)

N1 Buoy said:


> Did you try using http://www.google.com/drive/start/apps.html ?
> 
> You can upload a spreadsheet on that containing postcodes and it will geocode the postcodes into points for you. You can also do stuff with postcode area polygons in google maps.


 
looks interesting, thanks


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## paolo (Nov 17, 2012)

Interesting idea.


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## Mapped (Nov 17, 2012)

paolo said:


> Interesting idea.


 
I can get hold of the necessary kit, do the analysis and probably get a journal paper published out of that 

Some of the data quality late at night might be a bit wonky mind


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## Mapped (Nov 24, 2012)

Has anyone used this program before? Looks like it could make my project a lot easier

http://www.safe.com/fme/fme-technology/


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## soundsystem (Oct 14, 2013)

Looks like I might be doing an MSc in GIS through Leeds University - and work will pay for it! Two of my colleagues have already done the same course, which I knew about, but assumed I'd need an undergraduate degree (I never finished mine!) to get onto a Masters course - but apparently professional experience can count as well!


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## toblerone3 (Oct 14, 2013)

Still very interested in GIS. Have been on a one-day MapInfo course recently, but I still find it very tricky and need constant guidance from GIS experts.


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## soundsystem (Oct 14, 2013)

What parts do you find tricky?


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## toblerone3 (Oct 14, 2013)

I was asked to create a map of the location of all the car club bays in a certain London borough and draw 300 metre circles around each bay and exclude the area of the borough that was open space or parkland and find out what of the borough was neither within 300 metres of a car club bay nor consisting of open parkland.  Its a bit of a tricky calculation.


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## weltweit (Oct 14, 2013)

I did a very basic GIS some years ago. I used post codes. I knew how much industry there was in each postcode area (from some survey or other), and I knew how much business we had in each postcode area (broadly), and I knew how many business contacts we had in each postcode. I plotted them on a map and a spreadsheet and calculated in which postcode areas we should be able to do more business and should focus our efforts.


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## soundsystem (Oct 14, 2013)

Hmm, yes it takes a bit of thinking to translate instructions like that into GIS operations... I suppose what you'd need would be a polygon layer of the borough, and another layer of the 300m circles, merged with the open space and parkland polygons, and use that as a sort of cookie cutter to remove those bits from the borough! I haven't used MapInfo but that's probably how I'd approach it in ArcGIS... not sure off the top of my head which tool you'd use for the cookie cutter bit, you'd possibly have to do it in edit mode...


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## soundsystem (Oct 14, 2013)

Do you use it at work Toblerone or is it more of a hobby?


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## toblerone3 (Oct 15, 2013)

soundsystem said:


> Do you use it at work Toblerone or is it more of a hobby?



Mainly at work, (I'm a Transport Planner) but I also embed some basic walking route maps from Google maps into my photoblog.  I know very little and have much to learn.


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## soundsystem (Oct 15, 2013)

toblerone3 said:


> Mainly at work, (I'm a Transport Planner) but I also embed some basic walking route maps from Google maps into my photoblog.  I know very little and have much to learn.



That's great. I do gas distribution planning, deciding which of the old iron gas mains need replacing with plastic and in what order. I've often thought transport planning would have some interesting similarities, and be something that GIS could be incredibly useful for. Is it the road network or public transport you deal with?

Feel free to PM me if you have any GIS queries or if you think of something that'd be useful to do with GIS, either at work or to do with the photoblog and need advice on how to approach it.


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## Mr Smin (Oct 17, 2013)

I've been doing some data visualisation with QGIS, which is a simpler problem than the car club question, but I notice that there are built-in analytical functions which could be leveraged to address the latter.

Last time I had to do anything like that I'd barely heard of GIS and needed to map which parts of the county were within 8 mins of an ambulance on blue lights. Raw data came from a biker medic doing some timed test rides and the results were plotted using graphics software.


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