iNation
- Created by
- Lisa Cornish
- data.australia.gov.au datasets used
Australian Atlas of Mineral Resources, Mines and Processing Centres
Australian Broadband Guarantee program data
Location of legal assistance service providers
Distance to legal service providers from disadvantaged suburbs
Location of Centrelink Offices
Economic Stimulus Package Project Data (community infrastructure & road & rail projects)
Crime incident type and frequency, by capital city and nationally
Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia (IMCRA) v4.0 – Provincial Bioregions
Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia (IMCRA) v4.0 – Meso-scale Bioregions
Commonwealth Marine Protected Areas Managed by DEWHA
Australia, World Heritage Areas
Land Use of Australia, Version 3 – 2001/2002
- Other datasets used
ABS Australian Standard Geographical Classification (ASGC) Digital Boundaries (Intercensal), Australia, July 2009
The Government 2.0 Taskforce has invited Australians to take Government data and use it to create applications, demonstraing better ways of providing information access and the benefits of open source information.
iNation provides quick and easy access to data from a variety of Australian Government Departments. By providing only nationally consistent datasets, all Australians accessing this site can search for and find consistent information on their area. This can then be compared directly with any other Australian region.
Data has been provided as an overlay either for Google Earth or Google Maps. The data can also be directly downloaded as a KML for viewing in Google Earth.
This has to be the most poorest designed sites in this competition.
frames.
echoing out the javascript into the html is such a poor design technique it takes over 1 minute to load any data.
also how can an entry which has been in the comp for less than 2 days have 143 votes when the top rated one has been around for a month and only has 200 votes.
i smell something bad.
Wow! What terribly useful and constructive feedback! Which site is yours, Gerad?
I agree my site is slow and if I was a professional website designer, I probably would have gone with an alternate solution. I have provided information on potential issues and have allowed data to be downloaded as an alternative solution.
I am a spatial data specialist and I’m using this contest to demonstrate the importance of the data within applications, hence the reason I am providing data to be downloaded.
This competition is providing a great wealth of information we can access, however there are not many which are nationally consistent and allow direct comparison between regions in Australia. For example, ACT is providing excellent school information but this cannot be directly compared with any other state.
It is also important to provide the attribute information behind a point, line or area dataset. Showing location only and its surrounds has limited use. Providing detailed information on that location allows for analyses and improved decision making, allowing the application to be used by an audience wider than simply someone bored at home.
As iNation provided nationally consistent data with as much attrubute information as possible, this comes as a cost to the performance speed.
But good luck with your entry Gerad and if you have any useful suggestions for improvement to the speed, I would definitely be keen to improve my site.
Good work on the datasets Lisa, I like how you’ve provided controls for selective viewing of datasets. As for loading speeds, I wouldn’t be too bothered with it since loading large geospatial datasets especially with real-time geocoding is a time consuming task. Might I recommend limiting the number of datasets displayed at any given time to be limited to 4-5 along with using marker manager instead of overlays to delegate marker management. I also wholeheartedly agree with your view on providing relevant information as opposed to just plotting points on a map. Given that you’re not a web developer, it’s a fantastic effort.
Gerad I’d like to see what you’ve come up with, especially so because of your comments regarding votes on both iNation and Victoria:FireReady
Hi Lisa,
Excellent job on this website.
You are obviously passionate about both aspects (GIS and it’s relationship to web design) as per your comments to Gerad and I think your points are valid.
Gerad mate, way to be jerk. It’s easy to criticise, much harder to be humble provide constructive feedback.
Good luck in the competition, Lisa.
You have to love how every new entry gets voted to 1 and this gets an extra vote up.
It would be funny if the People Choice award is awarded differently then the highest ranked entry
Lauren – agree. As soon as website goes in it gets about 10-20 votest of 1. So obviously people dont even look at it, they just vote to bring the rating of their mates up. This website is a typical example.
This entry is blatantly abusing the rating system.
Lisa are you actually going to respond or just keep clearing those cookies?
I dont think she is just clearing cookies. She is just running a script using screen scrapping to get list of top ten and then runs a rating javascript to update votes for that website and put everyone above her down (not hard to do), I have a suspicion few other websites in top ten do the same. As a case study, have a look at any new entry. All of them get a rating of 5 first and then about 10-20 ones. So there is a script there for sure, it would take too long to do it manualy. Script is not hard to create but why would you? Unless you know your solution is bad.
Hope the judges will disregard rating as it is useless.
I find it hard to believe you would do something like this and have your name attached to it.
Also way to ruin the whole point of this competition. Other developers were probably interested in receiving honest feedback and a score representative of how much time and effort they put into making a useful and appealing mashup.
I noticed a curious pattern a few days ago, where non-iNation entries seemed to keep dropping till they got below it.
As a test, tonight I rigged up a simple bot to throw about 50-100 1-star votes and drop it down to 6th or 7th (dropping it from 3.7 to 3.3). My hypothesis was that they would respond and down-vote the rest.
As luck would have it, about an hour ago a big flood of votes landed, 50 on the war memorial one and several hundred on the firelocator site.
Everyone other than iNation has now been dropped to a quite uniform 3.1.
The voting system is clearly a farce at this point, the only thing remaining is to basically flood the entire thing so badly that it become an inescapable conclusion the voting has been exploited and the results thrown away.
I should note that this is only a post-hoc analysis.
I have no evidence that it is anyone on the iNation team specifically doing this. It could be well meaning others, or just someone playing silly games with the voting system for fun.
I’m sure if Stephen Colbert had an entry, or Moot from 4chan, they would have a million votes by now.
I assign no fault to the iNation team, I just think it’s sad they’ve been caught up in the whole issue.
I did the same thing, but gave each low voted submission a number of 5 votes, so iNation was pretty much out of the top 20. It didn’t take long for everything above iNation to get voted down, and within a relatively short period of time, iNation was at the top again.
If this is related somehow (directly or indirectly to this submission), I don’t know. It could just as easily have been some troll that selected one entry and decided to annoy people using it, but look around at the social networks. No-one is really talking about mashupaustralia. Well, no-one except the people submitting the work (and begging for votes). It just doesn’t seem all that likely that it’s co-incidence, but it’s always possible that is it.
It was supposed to be fun. There should have been a community spirit behind it. Instead it’s turned into people patting themselves on the back, and holding the ball too tight, and that’s not dignified behaviour.
I have just logged onto the site to see how the feedback is going and see this!
I do like the suggestion that I am capable of writing a program to cheat! Thanks Igor! Sorry, I’m not. And my cruddy dial-up access would make it useless anyway.
After the time and effort I have spent getting the data and website ready, I have more important things to do than invest in cheating…like sleeping!
As per the feedback from the organisers, your comments are the important thing in the public vote. So visit sites, look at what they are trying to achieve, and provide comments on them. Just remember that all sites are providing ideas for what could be done if data becomes more freely available from Government Departments. I personally think Victoria: Fire Ready is an excellent example of potential capability and hope that will encourage greater data availablity.
If anyone does have relevant feedback, please post it. I would like feedback and suggestions for further development or to just discuss data provided as part of the competition.
I feel ridiculous posting this, especially as I don’t know if you’re responsible for the voting issues (you may of course not be), but it does seem unlikely in my mind. Otherwise you’d be apologetic that it happened, but you’re not. In my experience, overtly defensive people are almost always guilty.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make was it’s easy to tell people to go and comment on other entries, but noone looks past the top 10. People are missing out because they’re just not visible (myself includes obviously). The best solution I think is to remove all 1 and 5 votes. Only friends will ever vote 5, and noone in their right mind will vote something ’1′ unless they have vested interests.
Being able to see my local services on a single map is excellent. Could the map automatically zoom out to display my nearest service if I have zoomed in too far?
People are coming at this competition from two sides – the web developers who produce really slick sites that deliver a simple point type solution – and the data/gis people like Lisa who really delve into the data side but their interfaces aren’t that slick. Both are really important and I hope the comp will be just the start in bringing them together not building more barriers!
on the voting its too easy to vote without even looking at a site – so next time the voting option could be only available once you have viewed the site. but this comment should have been directed at the organisers not Lisa (is there a general feedback option?
on the criticisms that seems to be the downside of openness and democracy but I’m astounded at the lack of netiquette – you’ve got to put yourself in the shoes of the other person and how they will feel when they read your posting, maybe after a long hard day – very different to a face to face when you can respond immediately, read body language etc.