Data Visualization with Ruby and RMagick - Where Are Those Bikes ?

March 31st, 2008 by Thibaut.

Velib is a pretty neat service I use every week to move inside Paris. I have a annual subscription (30€) which let me borrow a bike for half an hour from one station and leave it to another. As both a confirmed geek and a Velib fan, I wanted to get an overview of the areas where bikes are available at a specific time of the day (here on 26th of March, around 1:43pm):

This article (for educational purposes only) describes how to create this picture using the Ruby language and the RMagick library.

If you work at Velib and would like to see this transformed into a live website, contact me a thibaut dot barrere at gmail dot com, I believe this would interest a few people out there.

Grabbing the necessary data

Availabilities of bikes at a Velib station

Using FireBug Network Monitoring feature on the Velib website, we see that availabilities for each station are published at the following url (here for station #20017):

http://www.velib.paris.fr/service/stationdetails/20017

This url will return the following XML back (here 15 bikes are available for use on a total of 29 bikes slots):

<station>
  <available>15</available>
  <free>11</free>
  <total>29</total>
  <ticket>1</ticket>
</station>

Latitude and longitude of a Velib station

Using FireBug again we find that stations coordinates are available here:

http://www.velib.paris.fr/service/carto

Here’s an extract of this file (note the lat/lng attributes in the marker tag):

<carto>
  <markers>
    <marker name="20017 - RUE SAINT BLAISE" number="20017" address="69 RUE SAINT BLAISE -" fullAddress="69 RUE SAINT BLAISE - 75020 PARIS" lat="48.8568138966" lng="2.4090329253" open="1"/>
  </markers>
</carto>

Give me a background map, please!

We’ll use the Google Maps Static API (free registration required) to retrieve the background map through the following url:

"http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=#{lat},#{lon}&zoom=#{zoom_level}&size=#{size}&key=#{GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY}"

After a bit of trial, the center of Paris is roughly at latitude 48.856667, longitude 2.335987. I write that down.

Plotting the stations on the map

How to translate the latitude and longitude of a station to pixels coordinates ?

We can retrieve the bounding box (north-east-south-west) from the Paris-centered map using Google Maps API getBounds() method:

<!DOCTYPE html "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <title>Google Maps JavaScript API Example</title>
    <script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&amp;v=2&amp;key=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE" 
            type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">

    function initialize() {
      if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
        var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"));
        map.setCenter(new GLatLng(48.856667,2.335987), 12);

        var bounds = map.getBounds();
        var sw = bounds.getSouthWest();
        var ne = bounds.getNorthEast();

        document.getElementById("infos").innerHTML = sw + ne;
      }
    }

    </script>
  </head>
  <body onload="initialize()" onunload="GUnload()">
    <div id="map_canvas" style="width: 500px; height: 400px"></div>
    <div id="infos"/>
  </body>
</html>

This HTML will display the bounds we need, and we write them down:

  SOUTH = 48.811385499847525
  WEST = 2.2501373291015625
  NORTH = 48.901740646573025
  EAST = 2.4217987060546875

To translate a station coordinates to pixels coordinates suitable to draw on our map, we can use linear interpolation (it’s good enough in our case, at least!). This code will do the trick:

  def interpolate(lo_to,hi_to,lo_from,hi_from,current)
    lo_to + (current-lo_from)*(hi_to-lo_to)/(hi_from-lo_from)
  end

  def latlon_to_screen(lat,lon)
    [interpolate(0,WIDTH,WEST,EAST,lon),interpolate(0,HEIGHT,NORTH,SOUTH,lat)]
  end

You see that this way the South West bound will have pixel coordinates (x=0,y=HEIGHT) while the North East bound will have pixel coordinates (x=WIDTH,y=0), and that’s a good thing.

Choosing a visualization model

I settled with this model (although many others are possible):

  • one disc per station
  • the area (not the radius) of the disc should reflect the total number of bikes
  • the color of the disc should reflect the availability rate (availables bikes / total bikes), ranging from red (no bike available) to green (all bikes available)

Drawing the station

We’ll use linear interpolation again to compute a gradient of color and use RMagick to fill the discs representing the stations:

def draw_station(image,x,y,available,total)
  gc = Draw.new
  availability_rate = 100.0*available/total
  red = interpolate(190,0,0,100,availability_rate)
  green = interpolate(230,0,100,0,availability_rate)
  gc.fill = "rgb(#{red},#{green},0)" 
  gc.circle(x,y,x-Math.sqrt(total),y)
  gc.draw(image)
end

Putting it all together

We use the following libraries:

We take care of keeping a local copy of the downloaded data to avoid polling the Velib server unnecessarily while experimenting.

Here’s the whole code:


require 'rubygems'
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'
require 'rmagick'
include Magick

# a few constants first
GEODATA_FILE = 'carto.xml'
MAP_FILE = 'map.gif'
GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY = 'YOUR-GOOGLE-MAPS-API-KEY-HERE'

# the map bounding box
SOUTH = 48.811385499847525
WEST = 2.2501373291015625
NORTH = 48.901740646573025
EAST = 2.4217987060546875

# center of the map
CENTER = [48.856667,2.335987]

# size of the map in pixels
WIDTH = 500
HEIGHT = 400

# interpolate from [lo_from..hi_from] to [lo_to..hi_to]
def interpolate(lo_to,hi_to,lo_from,hi_from,current)
  lo_to + (current-lo_from)*(hi_to-lo_to)/(hi_from-lo_from)
end

# convert a latitude / longitude to screen coordinates
def latlon_to_screen(lat,lon)
  [interpolate(0,WIDTH,WEST,EAST,lon),interpolate(0,HEIGHT,NORTH,SOUTH,lat)]
end

# draw a single station on an image
def draw_station(image,x,y,available,total)
  gc = Draw.new
  availability_rate = 100.0*available/total
  red = interpolate(190,0,0,100,availability_rate)
  green = interpolate(230,0,100,0,availability_rate)
  gc.fill = "rgb(#{red},#{green},0)" 
  gc.circle(x,y,x-Math.sqrt(total),y)
  gc.draw(image)
end

# download content from an url and cache it on the disk
def download_file(url,filename)
  unless File.exists?(filename)
    File.open(filename,'w') do |output|
      open(url) { |input| output << input.read }
    end
  end
end

def url_for_map(lat,lon,zoom_level=12,size="#{WIDTH}x#{HEIGHT}")
  "http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=#{lat},#{lon}"+
  "&zoom=#{zoom_level}&size=#{size}&key=#{GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY}" 
end

# retrieve the station status - and keep a cache of the data in a file
def get_station_status(id)
  filename = "station-#{id}.xml" 
  download_file("http://www.velib.paris.fr/service/stationdetails/#{id}",filename)
  Hpricot(IO.read(filename))
end

# build the map url and download it
download_file(url_for_map(CENTER[0],CENTER[1],12),MAP_FILE)

# download the stations coordinates
download_file("http://www.velib.paris.fr/service/carto",GEODATA_FILE)

#image = Image.new(WIDTH,HEIGHT) { self.background_color = 'transparent' }
map = Image.read("map.gif").first

# iterate over the opened stations
stations = Hpricot(IO.read(GEODATA_FILE))

stations.search('/carto/markers/marker[@open="1"]').each do |station|
  # retrieve the coordinates convert them to screen coordinates
  x,y = latlon_to_screen(station[:lat].to_f,station[:lng].to_f)

  # retrieve the available and total bikes count using the station number
  station_status = get_station_status(station[:number])
  available = station_status.search('available').inner_text.to_i
  total = station_status.search('total').inner_text.to_i

  # draw this station on the map
  draw_station(map,x,y,available,total)
end

# save the resulting map
map.write("map.png")

Voilà ! I hope you enjoyed this article and learned something useful.

If you want to read more about Ruby

In case this article makes you want to learn more about Ruby, I recommend the following books.

If you are a beginner, pick those ones:

If you already are a seasoned developer, pick up those instead:

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