Open sourced data visualisation for Apache

Half a year ago Apache (a local news website) reached out to me and my brother Brecht for a collaboration on the topic of privacy in my home town Leuven. I thought it would be a great moment to try my hand at the (statistics) programming language R.

Armed with this tutorial I explored the R syntax, OpenStreetMaps APIs, ggplot2, etc. For the final textual overlays I used some python scripts.

Over the last couple of months I kept working on the toolchain I used for the articles and recently published the result OSMap.r

The visualisations below are those used in the dutch Apache articles about ANPR cameras and surveillance cameras.

This image indicates all the ANPR (Automated Number Plate Recognition) cameras in the city center of Leuven.

Because we also acquired some historical information on the filmed streets we thought a short gif/webm would nicely show the evolution over the years. With the basic pipeline created it was only a matter of stiching together the different frames (thx ffmpeg) and the result can be seen below (where red streets indicate filmed streets.)

That finally resulted in these two short clips: