Earth:Australia
- Contest Winner
- Student Entry -- Commendable Effort
- Created by
- Steve Melnikoff
- data.australia.gov.au datasets used
Australia, World Heritage Areas
Commonwealth Marine Protected Areas Managed by DEWHA
Groundwater Observation Bore Sites
Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia –Meso-scale Bioregions
Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia – Provincial Bioregions
The largest datasets (Queensland Property Boundaries Annual Extract 311MB, Queensland Wetlands Data 639MB) were also updated to KML format, but not included in here because of bandwidth considerations. They are readily available by contacting the author: steve.melnikoff@iwakari.com .
The Earth:Australia MashupAustralia contest entry responds to the challenge of demonstrating the enormous benefits to be gained with open access to government information.
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.
nice, sleek interface. can select datasets of own choice to mashup.
Steve
Nice concept but unfortunately those of us within government cannot view it from work as we do not have the Google earth plug-in. Access to the plug-in is blocked by our IT security settings. I’ll check it out at home.
Gerry
Gerry, sorry to hear about the blocking, but I look forward to any feedback you might want to share.
One of the goals of this project was to become more familiar with Google Earth. Learning that some government agencies might ‘block’ a webapp from functioning because of the plugin requirement is valuable information.
Another goal was to take on the challenge of updating the mapping data to KML, for use in Google Earth or maps within a Flex application interface. And, seeing the results of that transformation displayed in Google Earth (sitting on top of a Flex web application) is a nice reward.
I am hopeful that projects, like this one (and the other mashups), will contribute to building ‘communites of interest’ around the various technologies and datasets. For which I am excited about also being able to participate.
Steve M
[...] and encouraging our students can never be a bad thing, the judges also agreed to award both Earth:Australia and Community Rivers each a partial student prize for a commendable effort in student [...]