We love open data. We love exploring it, developing with it and visualising it. In fact we love it so much we decided to spend a week promoting it by taking a selection of our favourite open data sets and overlaying them on objects they can represent. The result is, we hope, a unique way of looking and thinking about open data beyond its normal uses.

With so many data sets to choose from we could have spent a year playing with images, however for the week we sourced from:

OS Open Rivers - Ordnance Survey

London Roads - OpenStreetMap

Sea Level Pressure - OpenWeatherMap

Terrain 50 - Ordnance Survey

London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory 2010 - London Datastore

The majority of the data was loaded into ESRI’s ArcMap and exported as a PNG file with the transparent and background colours set the same (shown below with a background map for reference).

This could then be imported into Adobe Photoshop and placed over our image of choice using some transparency, overlay and masking.

The individual images can be found at the following links: