I developed an automaton architect as a bot. It is called @architectBOT and it is dedicates itself to presenting architecture shapes. Originally, I used the Osmapi to scrap directly from the internet, but I only managed to access the elements directly by their id, so considering a very large, disperse and inconsistent database (many numbers do not exist) it was really expensive. OpenStreetMap is not very complete and sometimes it is very messy, so I had to use famous cities as the data base. Now the bot selects randomly from a group of cities and look for buildings with tags containing “amenity” or other specific names.

This was my secondary project and it is an unfolding of my dataviz. Basically, I am very interested in open source mapping and how it allows us to expand our comprehension of our cities. Automaton architect is promoting a very specific view of the urban tissue (building footprints) that embed important aesthetic and functional attributes.

The shapes and tags are unpredictable and sometimes there are some interesting shapes appearing suddenly on the screen (see the university above) or some strange description.

Unfortunately, my bot just entered twitter world, so it is not famous yet…