By incorporating the Mashup data into the site, volunteers can now view Government GIS mapping information to help strategically position their local river monitoring sites. For example, they can identify Government surface water monitoring stations, ground water bore sites, major river basins and protected areas across Queensland. They can identify Detox facilities around Victoria to encourage local communities to dispose of toxic substances, such as paint and batteries, at appropriate facilities to prevent them being illegally dumped down drains or directly into our rivers and creeks.

If you have been collecting data on the health of your local river, creek or wetland from anywhere around Australia and would like to submit you information online through our community-owned website, please send us a message using the Contact Us button on our home page at www.communityrivers.org.au.

Currently this uses the Commonwealth Agency data released by the National Archives and the goal is to link this to all the other datasets that have been released.

This makes EasyData a perfect tool for the staff of local government, regional development bodies, government agencies, and community associations, to substantiate grant writing, regional profiling, strategic planning, program evaluation, and evidence-based policy making.

EasyData is now the single, largest source of web-based information for South Australia’s metropolitan and rural regions. Used in conjunction with SA’s Strategic Plan, EasyData empowers communities to set regional targets and monitor performance against them.

Part one: 16 MashupAustralia lists in NeoGopher.
NeoGopher is a universa data browser developed in Melbourne, Australia and is designed to allow browsing of an HTTP web based API. NeoGopher is the intersection of linked data and the web. We have created 16 NeoGopher lists, each list presenting a data set from data.australia.gov.au. To see our MashupAustralia lists, download NeoGopher http://www.neogopher.com/downloads.shtml

Part two: 26 HTTP web based APIs.
We have converted CSV and XLS data from data.australia.gov.au into 26 HTTP web based XML APIs. These APIs are accessible by the public and support Xquery access including searching, sorting, paging and return compressed XML.

Our interface also allows users to customise the range of values they want mapped to their preferred colour spectrum – allowing them to make comparisons between their suburb or town and the next one over, just as easily as they can compare between states or rural and urban areas. The default settings allow our map to fit neatly on the lowest-resolution monitors common today, but a drop down interface allows it be quickly resized to present a more detailed display to users with larger monitors.

Australia is a a large nation with a diverse people; that makes for a very large amount of information embedded in our deceptively simple page. Still, our custom rendering algorithms ensure that overlays, however dense the information they present, appear without any long delays.

You might examine your own suburb or town, study the way geography shapes the people who settle in different places in your city or state or try to gain a deeper understanding of the multicultural patchwork of our nation. Whatever the questions this tool helps you answer, we hope you enjoy visually exploring the demographic shades of our sunburnt people.

By comparing proximity to essential and emergency services with suburb profiling data provided by the ABS, Australians now have a unique opportunity to research their next move.