If I dig a hole though the earth where will I end up?

This question is responsible for many man hours of procrastination, chat and deliberation, but now someone has created a website that can dispel any arguments.  It it called 'If I dig a very deep hole where will I end up' and it does what it says with not much in the way of fanfare: you stick a green flag in the map, click it, and up pops a red flag telling you where you'd end up.

Blurry map of the two flags

Be warned that many holes dug in Australia will bring you up in the middle of the sea, so that old “if I hold a piece of bread here and you go round the other side of the world and hold a piece of bread we'll be making a world sandwich!” chestnut is difficult to arrange from the playgrounds of most Australian primary schools.

 

House Hunting for a Vitamin D fix

I fell in love with my current flat instantaneously because when I first saw it it was drenched in gorgeous sunlight.  The bay windows that take up almost a whole wall seemed to encourage the light to bend around corners (I now realise that this was a man made effect created by well placing mirrors, but it's still a daily pleasure.).  I've always been the same, I got if off my Mum: one of the main things we look for when moving is where the light is coming from and how much of it there is.  But what if you find a great little property but it's an overcast day when you go to have a look at it?

Some genius has come up with an app that can solve even this problem.  It's called SunCalc, and it shows you the sun movement on any given day for any position on the map. It is my new favourite thing.

The three lines on the map show where the sun will be at sunrise (yellow), sunset (red) and at the time you specify on the time line at the top of the screen (orange).  The big yellow arc shows the variation of the sun's trajectories throughout the year.

So you can make sure you're moving into somewhere that will provide you with enough mood enhancing vitamin D to get you through winter.  It even works in the UK...  Even though it feels like the sun sometimes doesn't...  You could also use this app to help you arrange your mirrors in the right places.

App. Update

The apps4nsw competition has closed which means you can now have a look at all the entries.  And while you're at it you might want to vote for your fave. NSW related app. in the People's Choice Award.

Perusing the current top scorers and you'll find an app. for ranting about public transport, and a couple that access health data, but not too many map-apps..  The most popular map based apps. as this is being typed are all for the iphone:

City Tag: which uses pretty much all the  geospatial data the NSW gov. has to offer – public toilets, ATMs, BBQs,playgrounds etc. - but also lets you 'tag' your own favourite locations for other people to use.  The data it collects when you tag is kept using the Creative Commons license.

That's Camping: lists campsites and their details, the most useful element of which is probably the map directions to get to said campsite from your current location once you've picked a place to set up your tent.  (Including a local weather report might have been a nice touch...)

That's Camping screen shot

And an idea called NSW Traffic Report, which is cooler than than the dry name sounds: a mash up of weather reports, traffic reports, RTA cameras and the latest public transport info.  Unfortunately you can't see it working but it sounds pretty dang useful.

Art, Money and Maps

Further proof that pinning information to a map can make it a lot more interesting comes from two very different sources:

First, a Mapize map with the billionaires from the Forbes list pinned on to it (not literally of course), which could also be used as fuel in ye olde Sydney vs. Melbourne debate, because it shows that Sydney has five resident billionaires against Melbourne's three.  Perth has one too, but surely the place with the greatest wealth per capital in Australia must be Humpty Doo, as there's a billionaire residing just outside of it – take that Sydney and Melbourne.

And second, a map to which great landscape paintings have been pinned.  This map is on a site called Geo-Coded Art.

It's supposed to bring attention to some of the world's greatest, but overlooked, landscape paintings, and you can browse by location, artist or painting name - it's good fun just to have a look at the map and see which areas are most painting-ogenic.

Competing to make government data more interesting

What do you do after you've mashed up some information with some maps?

Well you might want to create an application to help display it.  And after the interest shown in the MashUp Australia competition both the NSW and Victorian state governments are getting in on the free-ing up government data act by launching App building competitions, aiming to pique people's interest in doing new things with the government data they've released into the Creative Commons.

apps4nsw screen shot

The apps4nsw competition came first, offering a $100,000 prize pool for people with either the ideas, or ideas and development skills, to make good and interesting use of some of the government data available from the NSW Data Catalogue – which includes datasets like the Map of Fixed Speed Cameras in NSW or the Additional Transport Timetables set up for Major NSW Events.  The closing date for submissions of either app ideas, or prototypes, that will, as the website says: unlock the potential of NSW information, is the 22nd of March.

Never to be outdone by NSW, the Victorian State government announced the App my State competition, which invites people to create or imagine applications that: aim to make Victoria the best place to live, work, visit and raise a family. The prize money on offer is the same, and you're invited to use just Victorian government data, source your own or mash it all up together.

Vic apps screen shot

You can have a look at some of the Vic app entries so far here and the idea entries here. The competition closes on the 23rd of April.

It's interesting to see what kinds of things people come up with but it's more interesting to see what new data, if any, the state governments give people access to.

Mashing up with the Australian Government

One of the things on the 'to-do' list leading up to the Nestoria Australia launch is to collect as much interesting geo-spatial data as possible to add to our maps.  Quite a lot of this information is owned by some facet of the Australian government and they're not always entirely trusting when it comes to entrusting people with it, despite the existence of the Australian Gov. 2.0 Taskforce, which is supposed to be all about online engagement between the public sector and public sector information, and the individual.  These are the guys who can help free up the information we'd like.

While part of the engagement process is about freeing up access to data, there's another side of it, proved by Google's Public Sector help page, and that's encouraging government agencies to use other web tools to add relevance to their sites and present their own data in interesting ways.  The 2.0 Taskforce were the organisers of the MashupAustralia Competition which was supposed to encourage people to use government data in an interesting way, so it's interesting to see some government agencies using Google Maps as templates for presenting their own data.

Mapping our Anzacs

The Anzac spirit is one of the few non sport related sentiments that the majority of Australians are united on, and this site, created by the National Archives of Australia, arranges the details of the 375,900 servicemen and women against a Google generated map of where each one was born or enlisted.

Australian's World Heritage List

The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts presents its information about Australia's 28 World heritage Listed sites (from Kakadu National Park to the Sydney Opera House) pinned onto a Google Map as well as in a list.

NSW Government Stimulus Snapshot Map

And the NSW Government has made some coloured warratah icons to use as pins to map out the different kinds of projects its $62.9 billion Economic Stimulus package will be spent on.  [Red is for education and purple is for transport.]

Putting our content where our blog text is

All this talk about finding interesting data and mashing it together and pinning it down to a map - if you don't mind the rough housing description - may make you wonder what Nestoria is doing to promote this sort of thing – apart from getting excited about it on the blog.    Nestoria is putting its content where it's blog text is, by making our API available to developers  interested in mashing or layering it up or using it to create something new and exciting on the web.

The Nestoria API has been around since the early days when you could get a thumbnail, details of the property and a link for more information, but it's undergone a lot of improvements and updates since then; including increasing the image sizes and allowing different kinds of search filtering, from highest and lowest prices to land size or number of bathrooms.

The Nestoria team have watched with interest and sometimes excitement as a whole range of cool things have been done with the data on the API, the current faves are  iphone applications UKProperty, Locati and Property Near Me.

As yet no one has mashed up Nestoria's average house price data, and some senior members of the Nestoria team would love to see that happen if anyone has any ideas...

If you're not a developer the API might sound a bit beyond you, but that's not going to stop you from having your own co-branded version of Nestoria onto which you can cut and paste property lists and listings and embed dropin maps into – this is all available at the exceptional good value price of free.

As of yet the Australian site isn't accessible, but it's only a matter of time.

Mashup Update

Here's a Mashup Update, the winners have been announced and they're both implementations with a similar feel and a relevance for Nestoria users:

Suburban Trends compares and contrasts suburbs on things like crime statistics, levels of acquired education, socio-economic standing and perceived safety standards,

and

Know Where You Live which aims give you as much information as possible about where you live, including historic photos, rental price data and various statistical data – the judges liked the citizen-centric 'common questions' section, which added to a user experience that could have been considered a little dull considering much of the data available at the moment is a bit on the dry side. This mashup was also created in 24 hours...what have you done with your day today...

Have a look at the full list of winners here.

We're not the only ones who love maps: Nestoria Interview with Julian Doherty

To justify the time I spent trawling over the MashupAustralia competition website I got in touch with one of the map mashers, Julian Doherty who is also a senior software developer at Lonely Planet.  At LP Julian is part of the community product team, who are responsible for developing all the social user interaction features, like discussions, groups and multi-user gadgets.

Julian also adds: I'm a geek through and through, I love playing around with technology and software development. In my spare time I play a lot of video games, and run a few websites about them (ubercharged and ihatevans are a couple).

Let's start with the map mashup competition, can you talk to us about the map you produced at the govhack event and how you settled on the idea?

The mashup we produced is called "it's buggered mate". It's a simple mashup that allows users to pinpoint maintenance tasks that their local council needs to attend to by picking a location on a map, drawing details, and annotating with text and icons. The app itself is pretty basic. It's got simple data entry and uses Google maps with some extra layers that Ken Hoetmer (another Lonely Planet person) wrote to allow drawing and annotation on the map.It's gotten a bit of media attention in the press releases etc - I think mainly because of the name. We intentionally made it a bit cheeky and very "Australian" so it would seem familiar and make users more comfortable. Which is ironic, because the LP team we had at govhack consisted of me (a New Zealander), a Canadian, and a Welshman :P

We settled on the concept because we couldn't think of anything better. The data feeds available at govhack weren't actually all that inspiring, and a lot were at an aggregate level without any geocoded information, so they didn't lend themselves to creating deep mashups with lots of user generated content. In the end we built that one because it *doesn't* actually read any data from any government sources, but rather allows data to be collected and fed *into* government rather than out of it to the public.

Later we integrated council lookup using geo2gov.com.au (another govhack project) to figure out which council was actually responsible for the area that users have identified (but I think they're changed their site, and the lookup isn't working right now, I'll have to fix that)

One of the aims of the competition was to promote open access to geospatial data - how much of an issue is access to data for people wanting to play around with maps?

Access to data was an issue. A lot of it is aggregated, and not presented in a format that is readily usable by 3rd parties (Excel spreadsheets, proprietary formats etc). And most of it doesn't contain a lot of geocoded information, so it makes it hard to cross reference it against your own data. There are a lot of government information sources that *are* available, but only via a web form that has to be used from a browser - which makes it difficult to consume from a mashup without resorting to screen scraping, which is a pain. Ideally, all these data feeds would be accessible via a simple web service API that other 3rd party applications can talk to automatically to pull down data to mash up.
That isn't because things are secret, or restricted, more that they just weren't designed to be used that way. Hopefully awareness gets raised through events like govhack, and data will become more available. Even in the last couple of months a lot of data sources have opened up.

What are some of the most interesting uses for this kind of geospatial data have you come across?  From both the practical to the weird and wonderful.

Some of the coolest ones I thought were the ones that layered a heap of data sources together to give you an interactive picture of what different areas are like. e.g Suburb Matchmaker , Know Where You Live, Suburban Trends and Lobby Lens which did a similar thing combining government lobbying data. There were a few "find the nearest toilet" apps that seemed to be crowd favourites as well :P

What kind of interesting implementations can you imagine on the horizon?  (Even if it's the far off horizon)

Big trends in internet development are real time, geo, mobile, and user generated content. These all relate to each other, and make 2-way communication between users and data easier and more useful. Getting real time updates on events happening around you, and providing feedback will be very cool. I think the user interfaces of mobile devices needs some time to develop, at least for the type of mashup we did, it's a pain to click through text fields to enter details on a mobile device. Having intelligent devices that can figure out what's going on around you and automatically send through that data for you would make these type of apps really useful.

e.g. for its-buggered-mate, it would be great to just point your mobile phone at a pot hole in the road, or a broken playground, take a picture, then have the phone figure out what you want to do - in this case report the problem along with the location and maybe some context information about it without any other user interaction.

You recently held a HackDay at LP Melbourne, can you talk about why you hosted the event and what kind of interesting ideas came out of it?

The LP hack day was to promote the LP places-of-interest API that we've recently opened up for public use. and also to join forces with govhack to host a Melbourne event following the Canberra event the weekend before.
In addition to promoting the API, it was also to test it out in the real world, and see what else needs to be added to it to make it useful.

The LP API exposes places of interest (POIs) collected as part of the travel guide production process (hotels, restaurants, sights etc) tagged with geo info. 3rd party applications can find POIs based on a place name, destination, or by specifying a lat/long bounding box.
Google developed a Wave application "Trippy" with us as part of the Google wave launch a few months back using this API.

There were a lot of cool apps that came out on the day. The winner was one that generated a road trip from a starting point to random interesting destinations in the area: A user enters a starting point (e.g. "Melbourne"), and a distance they want to travel, the app then goes and pulls down POIs from LP in the area, and plots the road trip with directions onto a Google map. Very cool - Although it uses the API in ways we hadn't anticipated and stresses it quite a lot. We had to bump the throttling limit WAY up to even let it work. Which is good, that's the kind of feedback we wanted to get, and it helps ongoing development going forward.

I've got the impression that the geospatial and mapping community in Australia is a pretty interesting place to be, can you give me an idea about current thoughts and trends in the field at the moment - what are people whispering about, what are people complaining about and what are people trying to crack - that sort of thing.

Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening. To be honest, I'm only closely familiar with what's happening at LP - although I think Google Maps was developed in Sydney, and there's some very cool stuff happening there.
Part of what we're working on is trying to link existing content more closely with geo data. We've got a heap of content on destinations that is generated by forum posts from users etc, but a lot of it has either no geo data, or only very coarse grained data based on country or maybe city, which can make it hard to link together. We're trying to figure out ways of grouping together by automatically tagging it based on general themes and location. Hopefully so we can better and present it in a way that it can be easily cross referenced by different parts of our site.

Is there anything else you'd like to add that I haven't quizzed you on yet?

Probably, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head :)

Thanks very much for your time Julian.

No probs