Geographical Characterisation of British Urban Form and Function using the Spatial Signatures Framework - the underlying data

This repository contains the underlying data used to develop geographical characterisation of British urban form and function using the Spatial Signatures framework.

This is a data annexe to the Open Data Product available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16691575.v1. More background on the notion of Spatial Signatures available in https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2022.102641

Content

The repository contains three partitioned Apache Parquet files:

• form
  • Apache Parquet file containing enclosed tessellation geometry and all form-based characters, both invididual and contextualised. The file follows the specifications for storing geospatial data in Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet v0.1.0 (WKB).
• function
  • Apache Parquet file containing all function-based characters, both invididual and contextualised.
• signature_type
  • Apache Parquet file containing signature type of each cell.

All files share the hindex field allowing their combination.

Use

The recommended way of use is by loading the dataset as a dask_geopandas.GeoDataFrame object. To connect to the data:

1. Clone the repository:

> git clone https://github.com/urbangrammarai/signatures_gb.git

2. Fire up a Python session on an environment where dask-geopandas is installed (for example, the 'gds_env'), and import it to the session:

import dask_geopandas

3. Connect to the required table (e.g., form):

db = dask_geopandas.read_parquet('form')

4. The above should give you access to the table:

>>> db.info()
<class 'dask_geopandas.core.GeoDataFrame'>
Columns: 238 entries, hindex to area-weighted ETCs of enclosure (Q3)
dtypes: geometry(1), object(1), float64(234), int64(2)

>>>  db.head()
             hindex  ... area-weighted ETCs of enclosure (Q3)
0  c000e109777t0000  ...                             0.001069
1  c000e109777t0001  ...                             0.001024
2  c000e109777t0002  ...                             0.001024
3  c000e109777t0003  ...                             0.001064
4  c000e109777t0004  ...                             0.000928

[5 rows x 238 columns]

Column names and descriptions

[Work in progress]

Column names and descriptions are available from:

• The two dictionaries in here
• The official but aggregated description on Figshare