GIS.org.nz

Executive Summary

The Review requests that the CEO of Land Information NZ note the recommendations outlined in this document, and institute the policy directions and resourcing necessary to give effect to the Landonline Geospatial development required to support All Of Government.

Problem Statement

Landonline was developed for the internal requirements of LINZ, particularly managing and recording land titles registered under the Land Transfer Act.

WORKSHOPS: ANZLIC SPATIAL RESOURCE DISCOVERY AND ACCESS TOOLKIT

Three ANZLIC (Australia New Zealand Land Information Council) workshops related to geospatial metadata are being held in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland in early August. The aim is to train people who in turn can act as trainers in their own organisations with respect to geospatial metadata. Come along and learn about the recently released, free, standalone ANZMet Lite metadata tool, and how to use it plus metadata guidance resources in your organisation.

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.

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.

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 at Geospatial Mash-up 2008 Participants .

I have been having an 'enlightening' discussion with the Electoral Commission recently when they released the maps of proposed electorate changes for the next two elections. After having a little look at the site, it struck me that the maps provided actually made it quite difficult to allow proper spatial analysis to occur as the proposed boundaries were not available for download and analysis.

There are broad level maps available, for example Rangitata, as well as a web mapping solution - although as I write this, it doesn't appear to be displaying the proposed boundaries to any significant level of detail.

Disappointed at the options of trying to compare the current and proposed electoral boundaries, I sent some feedback to the website asking if they would consider making the information available in a more suitable format.

Brian at the Surveying Department at the University of Otago has released world files for all the orthophotography on the Land Information New Zealand website. You can download them from here. Here is the info contained in the readme file.

The two zip files here (jgw.zip and twf.zip) contain the georeferenceing information required for the LINZ NZTM orthophotos. The names of the files have been changed to remove the fiscal year information ñ i.e. bq23b_fy_05_06.jpg has been changed to bq23.jpg.

I have not checked any of the tiff orthophotos against these georeferenceing files (I simply changed the jgw extension to twf), but they should work ok.

Feel free to use and redistribute these files, however we would request that you acknowledge the School of Surveying, University of Otago in any use of them.

If you find any mistakes please let me know at brian@surveying.otago.ac.nz

You can obtain the orthophotos from the LINZ website at
http://www.linz.govt.nz/core/topography/aerialandorthophotos/nztm/index.html

Brian Grant
School of Surveying
University of Otago
www.surveying.otago.ac.nz
October 2006

Begs the question - why isn't LINZ releasing all their images with the appropriate world files? Hello, LINZ, are you listening? ;)

The South Korean Government is going to utilise an open souce mapping software package - IntraMap/Web (what appears to be a Korean company) - to manage and publish their nations mapping needs.

The unified digital map DB central center will be linking each data centers in providence, county, city levels to link Web servers, DB servers, administrator servers and GIS servers using Redhat#039s enterprises Linux 4.0 version.

The GIS engine #039IntraMap/Web#039 by KSIC was picked for its open source software. This shows the administration#039s intent to spread open source software and to apply it to other public access projects in the future. This kind of project can be an ideal showcase for the open source and foundation to overseas ventures for the domestic firms.

I think it is excellent to see these open source projects being picked up by Governments - hopefully we will see more of this occurring in New Zealand. Hint hint.

The State Services Commission has released a new webpage that provides an overview of Geospatial Information Standards. Comments are being solicited on this introduction to GIS standards.