GIS.org.nz

The Ministry of Health recently released the Altas of Socioeconomic Deprivation (NZDep2006). PDF maps are available from this Atlas's homepage on the Ministry's website, but shapefiles aren't directly available from the website. A free CDROM is available that contains shapefiles - as well as all the reports. I received my CDROM a couple of days ago and it contains the following layers - CensusAreaUnit, DistrictHealthBoard, NZ_Outline,NZDep2006, and TerritorialAuthority.

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 .

As part of the GOVIS Geospatial miniConference, a maps mashup is being held the day before with data sets being provided by LINZ and others. More information will be made available on the barcamp page (for more on what a barcamp is - click here).

A challenge to innovate! A challenge to find open data! Create and present your mash-up with a few data sets provided for the BarCamp! Cool Prizes! Sponsored by Statistics New Zealand, The New Zealand Geospatial Office and the Spatial Sciences Institute. Entry is open to everybody who is enthusiastic about using New Zealand's core geospatial data in presenting current issues and analysis challenges! MashUp 2008 is an event which brings together New Zealand's leading technical experts, as well as budding enthusiasts, in combining information sources with mapping boundaries and data in innovative ways. Rules of the competition will be downloadable here as soon as possible.

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.

OpenLayers, an open source library that allows you to interface to many web mapping services has been released. We are looking at using this to add mapping capabilities to Sahana.

Well, I was going to post about this great effort in the US to place some topo maps in the public domain, but they have already been released! I wonder if we are going to have take these sorts of actions to get more NZ data released...

Here is a short article that goes into the methods that are used to capture information about the roading network in the US, for eventual inclusion in GPS devices. The car looks a bit creepy though with the security-like cameras mounted on top of it!