Hacking with GLA environmental data
Rewired State kindly invited me along to a two-day hack with unreleased environmental data from around London, held at City Hall or the GLA.
I discovered that there are a lot of interesting environmental data sets on the London Data Store, as well as some new APIs that the GLA are working on with Kings College.
What grabbed me was that scouring through the data available was that there is an hourly feed available of 99 air quality sensors across London that I can't seem to see has been hacked on before. I think it went live actually during the hack, and I must be one of the first external people to play with it.
So I did a couple of air quality hacks. One with the live data and one without (the API went live on the second day and I didn't get a chance to pull it in).
This is a cute little game idea (with a monster of course) that could be used as a way of explaining which parts of London have good/bad air quality. Kind of silly, but playing around with the idea of ambiently getting information across to people in an unexpected way.
One issue with much of the way that air quality data is displayed currently is that it appears very academic and unfriendly. I wanted to concentrate on answering just one question well, and this is it - 99 live sensors picking up air quality. The map changes colour to be more grey on a bad day, and I've got a "human" way of describing the air conditions:
And clicking on one of those points gives you an ultra-simple meter reading for that location. The idea being that you can add this to your mobile phone home screen and check it before you leave for work of a day.
I had some trouble with the JSON formatting, so I also suggested putting these feeds on Pachube. And wouldn't it be amazing to do some live data visualisation in that beautiful public space on entering City Hall? I feel a proposal coming on...
