Over the last decade or so there has been an explosion of research interest in the area of measuring (and forecasting) of traffic and commuting patterns. Part of this is driven by ever increasing human mobility: in 2016 alone, people in the UK travelled a collective 800 billion kilometres [PDF], more than 60% of which… Read More »
One of the early areas of focus of the NEXUS project has been to look at the extent to which Twitter data can be used to accurately map commuting patterns (and what types of biases etc. need to be corrected before this mapping can really work). As part of this Graham has set up an interactive… Read More »
One of the deliverables from the UrbanData2Decide project has just been published on the project website. It’s a report on social and open data sources and visualisation methods for urban decision makers, and was jointly authored by ourselves at the OII, SYNYO and the ODI. The main aim was to gather existing knowledge on what data… Read More »
The UrbanData2Decide project has partly been about getting to know local government administrators and understanding more about the types of data related challenges they face when policymaking. One common refrain is that there simply isn’t enough information, and what there is goes out of date quite quickly. Hence decisions have to be made on common… Read More »
Twitter is going to be a major data source for the NEXUS project, as it is for almost every other project studying social media data. Twitter is extraordinarily generous in terms of making its data available, and this generosity has sparked huge research interest. One of the problems of relying on third party data is, however,… Read More »
One of the key aims of the NEXUS project is to explore the extent to which human mobility patterns (e.g. commuting, tourism, migration) can be effectively mapped using social media data. Effective information on mobility is of vital importance to policy makers, yet is often in short supply or is expensive and difficult to collect (take… Read More »
“Big data” is a growing area of interest for public policy makers: for example, it was highlighted in UK Chancellor George Osborne’s recent budget speech as a major means of improving efficiency in public service delivery. While big data can apply to government at every level, the majority of innovation is currently being driven by… Read More »