GIS.org.nz

Some great news out today - the Ministry for the Environment has announced the re-release of a couple of their datasets under the Creative Commons licence (technically the CCv3-BY). MFE's page is here. MFE's Koordinates.com stream is here.

Two major environmental databases are set to become more accessible and easier to use following the re-release of these digital maps by the Ministry for the Environment.

Advancing the Role and Use of GIS through Innovative Applications and Collaborative Working

22 & 23 June 2009 Duxton Hotel, Wellington

After a well received inaugural event for GIS, conference provider BrightStar returns to offer a wide range of case studies and perspectives from a wide variety of practitioners, including Colin MacDonald, Chief Executive of Land Information New Zealand giving an opening address. Also hear from speakers from local government, research organisations, utility companies, consulting firms and emergency services.

The FOSS4G 2009 conference being held in Sydney in October has released their call for abstracts. The deadline for abstract submission is 1 June 2009. For more information, please see the FOSS4G press release.

Some further information about the upcoming LCDB consultation workshops are now available.

You are invited to participate in one of a series workshops to help plan the development of the next version of the national Land Cover Database (LCDB).

Land Information New Zealand and the New Zealand Institute of Surveyors have established a joint working group to take a critical look at the cadastral survey industry.

Purpose of the working group

This working group aims to form a shared view of the future state of the cadastral survey industry, how key players will contribute, and what needs to be done to get there. Once this view is formed, we will be able to identify future opportunities and increased efficiencies in the industry for all those who create, regulate, maintain or use the cadastre.

An invite to an upcoming series of workshops...

You are invited to participate in the first of a number of workshops to help plan the development of the next version of the national Land Cover Database (LCDB).

The LCDB is a nationally significant database which is widely used throughout the country. It is a digital map created by grouping similar types of land cover which can identified from satellite images. There are currently two versions in circulation depicting New Zealand’s land cover in 1996-97 and 2001-02. A third version is proposed which will use the mapping output from the Ministry for the Environment’s Land Use and Carbon Analysis System (LUCAS) programme as a base. This mapping is based on satellite data over the summer of 2007-08.

We need your input to scope the new version of the LCDB and makeit relevant for today’s needs. The workshop will be of interest to policy makers, land managers, researchers and analysts –anyone with an interest or a stake in land cover information.

More workshops will be held during February 2009 in Hamilton, PalmerstonNorth, Christchurch and Dunedin.

The first workshop is being held in Wellington. Tuesday 16 December, 2008 from 1-4pm at Environment House, 23 Kate Sheppard Place, Wellington.

(pdf here)

The conference programme for GeoCart'2008 has been released. I've just added this to the calendar, and for those that don't know, GeoCart'2008 is being held at the University of Auckland on the 1st to the 3rd of September. More details are available on their website.

It's not necessarily spatial, but there is a lot of good and relevant work going on in the eGovernment space. To make it easier to find some of these, I've created a news aggregation feed that points at these eGovernment resources.

In an email out late last week John from the NZ Geospatial Office announced the following...

Hi All
The New Zealand Geospatial Office is pleased to announce that John Clegg from ProjectX has been awarded second prize for his Mashup - Crime 10K.

Check out Crime 10K @ http://blog.projectxtech.com/page/2/ or http://www.gis.org.nz/wiki/Geospatial_Mash-up_2008_Participants

Cheers
John

Congratulations to John, not only for winning a prize, but for also actually completing a working solution! :) Thanks also to the New Zealand Geospatial office, and the other central and local government organisations that rallied around the mashup.

After the strong turnout at the initial Mashup meeting at the start of May, it is disappointing, but perhaps not unexpected to have so few completed entries. I wonder if the short time frame - e.g. less than 2 months from discussions to submission resulted in too tight a timeline, especially as those that have the skills to mash something up in a short time are probably quite busy with work already? I hope that the Geospatial Office does not lose heart from the low number of submitted entries. I would have liked to have played with the data in Sahana, but I think Sahana needs another 6-12 months before it will be ready to support that, and I certainly wasn't in a position to currently build something from scratch!

Perhaps a competition needs more time to be run? Given that most participants would be doing it as a voluntary effort anyway it may need a 3-6 month timeframe to get more teams participating.

Alternatively, perhaps we look at moving away from a competitive, team-based, do-it-in-your-own-time approach, and try something like a soild 2 days to work through some geospatial issues or a particular theme to provide some focus - for example a mashup to bring a pile of different GIS systems together and work on interoperability around a certain issue. My favourite would be around a disaster scenario as that provides a very dynamic environment where lots of new data is being produced, and mashups are needed to aggregate data from many different organisations, and it is needed in a timely manner.

Who knows? Perhaps trying to get it all nailed in one weekend, or a combined Friday/Saturday (one day off work, one day of weekend) may be a lot easier for most. It also has the added benefit of throwing a pile of people in the same room(s) and setting them to a task, rather than providing an independent, work-at-your-own-pace challenge.

I'd be interested to hear some comments on this issue!

One of the benefits of moving to the ProjectX servers has been the ability to better integrate RSS feeds and the like into the website. One interesting new twist on this has been the release of the 'nz data announce' feed. The first data feed to be piped in here is the 'recently added layers' feed from http://koordinates.com/. I'd like to thank Ed Corkery from Koordinates for implementing a feed that we could subscribe to and publish any new data.

I would like to encourage any other organisations that are publishing or releasing data sets to consider publishing a feed to enable easy aggregation of new spatial data sources in New Zealand. Additionally, we will probably look at creating our own announce feed on here that we can manually announce new spatial data sources.

Of course, we'd prefer that if you release data sets regularly, or they are updated often, that you publish a feed in preference, and let us know so that we can subscribe the aggregator to it.