OSINT At Home #10– How to map anything with freely available location data

we all like maps with a lot of data especially data that helps us with our research or investigations or visualizing a story over the next few minutes i'm going to show you how you can create your own maps and how to get access to public sources of location data so that you can create customized maps on whatever you want for example you could create something like this map that you're seeing here on the screen which is a map that i use for running and exploring the city of london all of those points that you're seeing are public drinking fountains or public toilets and why would i not use google maps because if we look at google maps there are significantly less locations available for these points other examples include using publicly available data to create a map of locations of cctv cameras in munich germany or gas wells in queensland in australia so sit tight and get ready for another visual tutorial [Music] hi everyone welcome back to this series on how to do open source investigations from home i'm ben and this is part 10 so let's get started [Music] this is a water drinking fountain in the heart of london right near st paul's cathedral which you might have seen in some of the other videos i've done on geolocation hey guys i do a lot of running through london and especially on long runs i need to find a place to fill up my water supply but also places like toilets for example and when i look on google maps on london there's not really that many places where i can fill up a water bottle i see some scattered here and there but not as many as i'd like and definitely not for toilets as well so what i've done is i've gone ahead and created my own map using open source data to first of all identify all of the water sites in london as well as all of the public toilets because when you've got to go you've got to go and what i'm going to show you over the next few minutes is how you can use something really easy like overpass to collect all of the data that's on osm maps and create your own customized map and layer that in google earth or in something easy like map hub to use for yourself your friends or the community that you're in this is especially helpful if you're doing a lot of database investigations or research or anything like that where visualizing maps and data is crucial to your research most of the information you find on a map for example like google maps is just lots of little data entry points but google maps doesn't show us everything it only shows us the things that maybe are necessary for applications or are necessary or popular for travel and places to visit there's a lot more information on a map than just what you'll find on google maps and we can have a look at some more mapped data by using something called overpass turbo which is a favorite side of mine to open up our field of vision when we're looking at data on maps overpass turbo is really quite easy to use you don't need to be a coder but if you if you can write anything you can just do it in the left box over here for those of you that want something simple and something that i always use a lot it's just the wizard setting over here so let's have a look for example and see what we can type in what i'm going to do is i'm going to run a search for drinking water in london because for me that's something that i'm often looking for when i'm out on a long run or when i do long walks through london drinking water is actually classified as an amenity which is a category that osm data users or openstreetmap data uses you can see here in the example on overpass turbo they have highway or tourism if you want to look at more of those you can have a look through the osm wiki and we can have a look at what's in the amenities category you can see that there's 219 pages in amenities which just goes to show you how much information is in osm data be mindful that this is just one category which is amenities all of these things we can search for police stations polling stations post boxes wineries workshops you name it they've probably got it for us we're going to look for water so if i do a little control f on here we have water points water or drinking water i'm going to keep this one simple as a little example and stick with drinking water for now i can pop that into my query wizard what i'm going to do is search for amenity which is the one for drinking water in london i'm going to build and run that query and on the left you'll see the auto text that the wizard has popped in there for me which is quite useful i don't have to type out that stuff it's just done it automatically which is why i like to use the wizard setting what's what it's doing right now is processing that query it'll pull that data and it'll map it out for us so now we have all of the amenities which are the drinking water points in the city of london and we can see that there's quite a few which is really helpful what i like to do is to add a bit of color to them so just for the purpose of this to make sure that these are quite visible for everyone i'm going to add a little text in here and don't worry if you're feeling left behind with this i'll also copy and paste the exact text that i use in the description below i'm going to run this and let's see what these little points look like on my map cool so here's my little data points that i have for all of the water drinking locations or fountains in the city of london this is really helpful for me because before while running i just used to fill up my water wherever i could see a water fountain but now i can actually use this map the best thing about this overpass turbo is that it lets you export the data in a lot of different variables so you could export it as a geo json format a gpx raw osm data for the purpose of this one and because we've been using google earth for the past few sessions i'm going to download this as a kml this simply exports the file as a kml that we can open up in our favorite little google earth if you're stuck on how to upload a kml into google earth all you need to do is drag the file and you can see i'm dragging the file and just drag it into a folder or wherever you have it on the left side under the places tab on the left in google earth here and what that'll do is automatically load all of those pins right there and we can even see that some of the names have come through and all of the other data will come through these so for example if there's an image attached let's click on that image and see what happens cool we've even got a little image of that one we have some names sometimes they'll have opening times or things like that we'll probably see a lot more information with the toilets as well because i want to keep these pins colored i might just change the style of these that's also very easy to do so if you want to change the style of your pins in google earth you can just right click on them and get info and you want to go to style and color and share the style of these pins so i might choose a nice blue pin for these so when i go for runs the other thing i'm often looking for when i stop is a toilet as well and i'm going to do the exact same search function again but rather than looking for the amenity of drinking water i'm going to look for toilets so let's first of all see if we have yep we've got toilets over here tag amenity toilets so i'm going to do the exact same search function here and i'm going to look for amenity toilets in london i'm going to build that query and you can see it does take a little bit of time to pull out the data but eventually it does get it great so now i have the location of all of the toilets in london and you can see that actually if we do this search in google maps so if i go london public toilets see how many pins pop up on my map when i search for public toilets in london now these might be ones with reviews maybe some of the ones that i've pulled up on here are closed but there's definitely a lot more here than there are here and you can start to get an understanding of how useful that might be if you're looking for things such as for example cctv cameras bank machines power lines whatever you're sort of looking for whether it be for geolocation or data or any form of research you can see that you can get a lot more pins through this osm data so what i'm going to do is export these again same process and i'm going to go back to my google earth and same process again drag into the folder and we can now see that we've got our toilets displayed what i'm going to do is again do the same thing to share that style and display them like so so now we can see our toilets are here and this is actually quite useful because now i can identify specific spots that i might want to stop at on my runs for example i might want to go to trafalgar square here where we have toilets on the left these are the opening times monday to sunday 10 am to 8 pm and we also have a water site over here and that's quite useful now there's a number of ways to share this data with other people which is something i really like doing is sharing data with others so what i'm going to show you now is the benefit of using something like for example maphub all you can do is import any of these so you remember in the overpass where we had export we can export as geojson gpx or kml and you can import those same types of files and you can separate those with either icons or colors just like i've done for google earth and this is a really useful way to share a map with a friend that might also be running through london and in need of regular toilet spots or regular water spots as well as any other sorts of research you're doing so whether you're working in a team and you want to share a map with the entire team and keep that as a login only map so keeping it private and secure or whether you want to share it with the world with the research that you do on mapping things like arms destinations or geolocation or things like that map hub is quite useful for that if you're wondering why this might be useful to your research well the data points are not just only water drinking spots and public toilets in london there is a lot of data when it comes to open street maps for example we could have a look at man-made objects such as petroleum wells or we could have a look at surveillance like cctv cameras so for example using overpass turbo here is the data points of cctv cameras that i've just quickly collected i've exported that to google earth here so we have a nice little list of cctv cameras it's always good to verify your data sources as well to make sure that these are actually correct if we wanted to do that for example i could maybe drive up one of these streets using google street view and see if actually this is the case where there are cctv cameras and of course if we have a look at this building here where there were lots of pins we can see there's one there one there seems to be one on the end of that building and quite a few on the side of that building along that car park there all the way along that street as well other subjects could be for example power lines are very interesting to look at bridges different things if you're looking for geolocating a specific image with a power line in the background or a cctv camera but also if you're interested in doing uh resource research so petroleum wells in australia here is one uh that i've collected before which has a look at petroleum well specifically in queensland and we can see quite an amazing data set of geographical points or geodata as i like to call it of petroleum wells in queensland and you can see a lot of these on the ground just from that sort of cut out there and the little well site where it would have been etched into the landscape maybe some of these pins are in locations where there are not currently wells maybe there might be new ones or maybe some of these might be destroyed and so they're a little bit old so again there are always limitations to geodata it's good to recognize that but these things are quite useful for different fields and different industries in research i hope you found this tutorial helpful especially if you are a runner through london or any other city in the world and you want to make your own map of drinking spots and possible toilets or cafes even but please do leave a comment and tell me if you've used your own map for something else or if you've created another data visualization using maps or google earth or anything like that and please share this with anyone else that might find this tutorial useful and that enjoys maps as much as you me and the other people that watch this channel do [Music]

Channel: Bendobrown

Views: 149,398

Keywords: google earth, open street maps, kml, osm data, how to use google earth, using google maps, mapping data

Id: bJkV3l5Haq0

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021