AuScope Portal
- Created by
- Jarek Sanders
- data.australia.gov.au datasets used
Australian Atlas of Mineral Resources, Mines and Processing Centres
- Other datasets used
- Web Map Servers from Geoscience Australia Web Map Servers from Geoscience Victoria Web Map Servers from PIRSA (South Australia) Web Map Servers from Geological Survey of WA Web Feature Servers from CSIRO (WA, Sydney) Web Feature Servers from Geoscience Victoria Web Feature Servers from PIRSA (South Australia)
The AuScope portal is a live “Geo”-centric view of Australia and its resources.
Numerous geological layers and data types can be portrayed in a simple map based interface.
Filtering and searching is also enabled on feature layers, with responses coming directly from services provided by multiple government agencies, not stored locally.
All layers can be added or subtracted to allow for visual inter-relationships to be seen.
Dynamic access to government web services means the data is always current
One thing I noticed right away is the HUGE win you can get from an interface prettyness angle if you can make the Google maps auto-size itself to fill the entire browser with a few margins as possible
It’s a neat trick I think I need to go work out for myself, and something I’d like to see done more often. You could probably have taken it even further by halving the height of the top banner, or perhaps doing it as an alpha overlay.
Another subtle thing this app does right is start with Satellite ONLY, no overlays. Being a Geo app it correctly factors out political boundaries right from the start.
In summary, a great and very workmanlike aggregation service.
Apart from some polishing, it does a great job.
Factoring “out political boundaries” goes deeper than the visuals in this spatial data infrastructure. The data is coming from (hosted at) the original data providers for the most part. So for example the Mineral Occurence data is coming from each geological survey in Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria.
For each of these the WFS request and response is in the Australian EarthResourceML standard. The original databases in each survey are not altered and the middleware layer (Geoserver 2.0 with application schemas) maps from the private database schema to the community agreed EarthResourceML – including structure and vocabulary translation when those are agreed.
Any client application, and the AuScope Portal is just one possible client, can thus access the data holdings of each survey as if they were one national data service, and you don’t need to copy the data nor deal with data conversion as its done at the source.
Some of the other services don’t have this functionality but AuScope is working with the state surveys to make more data available in this form and thus reduce the burden of access to national data sets.
[...] total, 81 mashups have been submitted to the Mashup Australia contest. The Auscope Portal one data.australia.gov.au dataset (Australian Atlas of Mineral Resources, Mines and Processing [...]