Earth:Australia addresses the transformation challenge of opening up government data sets in its ‘re-purposing’ of GIS (geographic information systems) data from ERSI shapefiles, to the more useable, and accessible KML (Keyhole Markup Language) format. KML files are supported by many different GIS viewers and as discussed in Wikipedia are excellent for: ‘expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future Web-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers’.

The technology Infrastructure for Earth:Australia includes: Google Earth browser plugin for data viewing, Adobe Flex framework for the user interface, and the Geospatial Data Abstraction Libray (GDAL) with related application libraries for shapefile to KML format conversion.

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.

It can determine jurisdictions, electorates, representatives, where your location is defined demographically at each layer within the Census, and provides identifier maps so you can link into other websites such as the Federal Parlimentary website, OpenAustralia, MyMP and more.

geo2gov can be easily incorporated directly into other mashups as a search or address box, and can be deployed as a virtual applicance locally in addition to the regular online Amazon EC2 cloud-hosted service.

To make the Census results from geo2gov.com.au even more useful, it also provides pre-compiled single file database packs of the Census for PostgreSQL and SQLite.

The HTML version of the website is provided for debugging and development purposes, and demonstrates a fairly typical usage of the API.

We have also taken the WWI photographs from the Australian War Memorial and created a Timemap. A chronological and geographical, photographic record of Australia’s experiences during wartime. We hope to extend this to include other photographic collections, integrate historical events and user contributed personal histories.

In Their Honour is an invaluable resource for teachers, genealogist and researchers studying Australia’s wartime experience and particularly for family members locating their relative’s final resting place.

Features:

• Searchable database of over 100,000 service men and women.
• Detail page for each individual in the index.
• Links to service records.
• Photograph of cemetery or memorial.
• Detail pages for almost 4000 War Graves and Cemeteries, worldwide.
• Links to additional cemetery information.
• Driving directions
• Geographical and chronological photographic record.

We explored information from the 2006 Census and crime incident data and selected some key points that we considered significant in the decision making process of anyone choosing where to live. Suburb Matchmaker also benefits people that want to know more about the area they live at and provides crime data trends to see how your area is evolving.

We believe that one of the major benefits of using open government data is that it bridges the gap between the information provided by public agencies and the citizens reacting to that information to engage in and with their communities. Suburb Matchmaker empowers inhabitants of any area wanting to attract more people to use its functionality to promote their events and other highlights with the use of visual media.

Web applications like Suburb Matchmaker that provide access to information and engage citizens reacting positively to this data could promote the creation of communities that become more integrated and self-sufficient

It combines and analyses all of this information to determine the location and proximity to your house.

If you are at risk, it instantly sends you a specific tweet, giving you the crucial early warning needed to stay safe.