Monday, July 01, 2013

Hacking Cats


A few weeks ago the BBC documentary programme Horizon broadcast a fascinating special about the life of the domestic cat. For the programme, The Secret Life of Cats, Horizon and a team from the Royal Veterinary College attached GPS trackers and micro-cameras to a number of domestic cats in a Surrey village.

The BBC used Ordnance Survey maps to visualise the individual tracks of each of the cats. Unfortunately they did not make the trace data available for other map developers.

No worries! Someone has now hacked the data.

The code for the hack is available on GitHub. Alongside the Python code for grabbing the trace data the repository includes KML and GeoJSON files of each cat's track and a link to a Google Map displaying each track.

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