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.

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!

I have just uploaded the following guideline to gis.org.nz. It is also accessible in the wiki.

The purpose of this Guideline is to unlock the government Geospatial Divide that is holding back NZ Inc.

Geospatial data is a key component of the governments Digital Content Strategy, and Geospatial Strategy, key initiatives of the Digital Strategy with its vision of “New Zealand will be a world leader in using information and technology to realise its economic, social, environmental and cultural goals, to the benefit of all New Zealanders.”

This Guideline focuses on the key questions of;

• What information to deliver
• What web channels should be used to deliver that information
• What web presence should be used
• What information barriers should be used if any

LINZ is undertaking a survey to understand the usage of NZTopoOnline. I would encourage everyone to fill it out and let them know how you use the site, and where they could make improvements.

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.

I came across this one-stop geospatial portal in Scotland. I wish that someone in Central Government, probably the State Services Commission, would hurry up and start a similar project here.

Geographical Information is vital to the operation of many business and government processes. During the process of developing a GI Strategy for Scotland it became clear that an important requirement was the ability to forge links between GI initiatives, projects, implementations and research activity. An easily accessibly registry of existing projects was seen as a necessary first step in this process. This site allows the searching of a catalogue of initiatives based in Scotland and beyond and lets you record details of projects and initiatives your organisation is involved in.

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.