Mark presented a number of presentations during the morning, starting with CEOs, followed by one focused on OGC and Disaster Management, as well as finishing with An Overview of OGC Standards and Programs. Hopefully these will be publicly accessible in Google on portal.opengeospatial.org – I’ll put links up when the files are openly available.

I got a great buzz to see Sahana, OpenStreetMap, CrisisCommons and Ushahidi mentioned in slides by Mark, and these event got coverage in the presentation to the invited Government CEOs at the breakfast session. In the open presentation on OGC and Disaster Management in the morning, Sahana got its own slide and was recognised for incorportating various OGC standards including Web Map Service (WMS), Catalogue, KML , Web Feature Service (WFS) and the Coverage Service. It is great to see the significant geospatial efforts that the likes of Mifan, Fran, and David have put in – amongst others and sorry I can’t recall everyones names!

I also talked about my experience around geospatial data and building safety evaluations following the Canterbury earthquake, and there seemed to be some real interest in using that as a possible test bed geospatial project that we may be able to undertake here in NZ. I must get onto blogging more about that.

As always, it was a great opportunity to catch up with some colleagues that I hadn’t seen for a while, and it has been particularly reassuring to see some great minds that were thought lost with the State Services Commission restructure now turning up in Land Information New Zealand. LINZ taking on these people definitely sends a positive signal about open data and standards. In particular I want to note Richard Murcott who is now the Geospatial Standards Leader at LINZ.

Anyway – what were some of the points I took away from the workshop?

• It sounds like Land Information New Zealand is going to become a full OGC member in 2011.
• The OGC GeoSMS standard is going to be coming soon! A discussion document from Freburary 2010 on OGC GeoSMS is available here (link to agreement page, then pdf download). This will be great to have a GeoSMS standard to work to, as we had created our own in Naval Postgraduate School Disaster Relief Experiments previously.
• Mark highlighted that demonstrating standards – through test bed projects and the like – is one of the most important aspects of standards promotion.
• The Taiwanese have been doing quite a bit of work with OGC, and have been doing some very interesting debris flow monitoring projects with OGC Sensor Web. There is supposed to be a good pdf available that outlines the Taiwanese work with Sensor Web.
• Geosynchronisation. OGC has within the last month announced the formation of a GeoSynchronisation Service Standards Working Group. This of course has a lot of potential – not only for taking OpenStreetMap data out into the real world, editing it, and coming back and syncing it later, but also of course for emergency management. I intend to watch this one quite closely.

One of the closing quotes of the emergency management presentation came from the Chairman of the OGC, David Schell.

What the OGC is doing is facilitating a common picture of reality for different organizations which have different views of the reality, the disaster, the catastrophe, that they all have to deal with collectively

The use of OGC standards is probably the only clear path forward towards a Common Operating Picture – well, one that has anything to do with location anyway.

In the afternoon, Richard Murcott of LINZ led a workshop discussing standards and interoperability.

One of the big takeaways for me was the model of Conceptual Interoperability from Simulation Theory. Basically it builds up from nothing – no interoperability, to a state of full interoperability – where fully conceptual models are used to integrate data consistently from multiple sources.

Of course, we are a long way from this in emergency management, a lot of the current interoperability we have is at level 2 which is only a common data format. The OASIS work with EDXL is taking us a step higher (level 3) with increasing semantic interoperability through the use of more clearly defined standards. I think there is a very long way to go using this model though to ensure we have interoperability that considers methods and procedures (level 4), assumptions and constraints (level 5) to a “fully specified but implementation indepentent model” (level 6).

Some other quick takeaway points that I and others came up with:

• There is a spectrum of the reason for interoperability – from selfish to altruistic. A selfish organisation wants to bring any data into its system and processes, whereas a truly altruistic organisation wants only to publish and share information.
• There is a spectrum of the management approach of interoperability – from adhoc/chaotic to extremely structured. Some organisations want full control over how interoperability is managed that require a very structured and formal approach, and even agreements or MOUs. At the other end is complete anarchy and chaos.
• Risk aversion is a significant barrier to interoperability, so clearly taking a risk management approach to interoperability is likely to provide a better means to manage risks, and hence make true interoperability more acceptable to management.
• Restrictive licensing of standards creates barriers to entry. Nothing new there.
• Data sets provide an excellent focal point for collaboration and communities may well form around a released data set. E.g. NZ Open GPS Maps project around released LINZ roads.

One of the final points Richard made in closing was more targeted at New Zealand in general, and certainly a sentiment I think we should take to heart. New Zealand, as a country, needs to behave more like a city of 4 million. Dispersed from Northland to Southland we pack nowhere near as much punch than if we better bring our expertise together from across the country. If we want to be more successful on the world stage, then we need to lose our small town mentalities, and start thinking bigger and broader!

To the Ministers of: Commerce, Land Information, Stated Owned Enterprises, Communications and Information Technology

Re: New Zealand Post Code Database

Dear Ministers,

Currently the New Zealand Post Code Database is a paid-for dataset that New Zealand Post (a New Zealand State Owned Enterprise) charges a fee for.

See: Postcode Network File

I would like the relevant Ministers to investigate the release of postcode data that was announced late last year in the UK, where they are undertaking to open up and make freely available the postcode database. This is a fundamental and key dataset for business (and indeed non-profits and other community interest groups).

I would like to refer you to this BBC article that indicates that the UK Government is going to release the postcode data for free this year, and also point out that in the US all their zip code data is made available for free.

The release of the NZ postcode dataset would certainly seem to fit well with the Geospatial Strategy , and would be a continuation of the release of digital boundaries that started a couple of years ago with Statistics New Zealand.

I thank you in advance for consideration of this matter.

Kind regards,

Gavin Treadgold
Christchurch

On the 12th I received a reply stating that Minister Joyce will respond in due course.

12 May 2010

Mr Gavin Treadgold
CHRISTCHURCH

Dear Mr Treadgold

On behalf of the Hon Maurice Williamson, Minister for Land Information, I acknowledge receipt of your correspondence of 8 May 2010 regarding the fee for accessing the New Zealand Postcode Database.

In accordance with Ministerial responsibilities Hon Joyce will be responding for Ministers and Hon Williamson will provide input as required to that response following his consideration of your correspondence.

Yours sincerely

Stephen Walsh
Private Secretary – Land Information

Lack of citation was my major concern with the other available maps that have been in wide circulation. The second concern with the other maps is that they showed push-pins when they did not have or could not cite the data to support specific points.

My reply follows:

I think you’ll find that most of those maps do actually have references, in the case of the Google Maps mash-ups, they are contained in the hundreds of comments accessible from the same page as the maps. In fact, it is generally from the posting of these references in the comments, that the Google Maps get updated. What they have failed to to is to make it easier to reference the citations, by not including the reference in the popup bubble above the marker. But if you read through all the comments, you’ll likely find most of the citations there.

Another big failure is to create a timeline/history so that one can see the growth/change in numbers over time for each marker. Most of the maps are purely a snapshot of the here-and-now, and give no context via history.

The real point that emergency managers should take away from this is the following.

Agencies that ‘own’ the source information (e.g. CDC, WHO, and health agencies in every other country in this case), really should be publishing authoritative georeferenced data at the source. If agencies did this, then there would be no need for these ‘amateur’ cartographic efforts to hack together information from news, rumours and other sources. It would sure save a lot of time and effort in people trying to recreate information that already exists and either hasn’t been released, or has not been converted to a georeferenced format.

Likewise, it isn’t really the role of companies to provide this information. Once again, they are just filling a gap that we, as emergency managers, have failed to meet.

The mashup culture is a direct result of a failure by emergency managers to make information available in a form that end users clearly want it (as evidenced by the time and effort they will put into recreating the data in the form that they want to use it).

Perhaps we really should start thinking seriously about how we can produce authoritative information in formats that our communities want.

If you have a look at the example map I created in under an hour on the 26th, you’ll note that I created a little table in each popup for a marker that contained a link to the source article, and in the case of the San Diego marker, included daily figures for three days so it was possible to track the state of that marker over time.In addition, I scaled the marker images so that they were more proportional to the number of cases – a marker for each infection quickly produced an unreadable map, hence it seemed a better approach is to produce summary markers for each location, with the size of the marker indicating the numbers.

The real trick is going to be to produce a web application to track and manage this information, that can then export it in a suitable form to display the information as discussed above. This is clearly something we should look at for Sahana.

Feedback on the ‘Gazetteer’ spreadsheets recently published on the web by LINZ is gratefully received. There will be on-going corrections to get the content as correct as possible in the coming few weeks and months. LINZ is currently investigating how it might potentially convert these spreadsheets to a more user friendly and effective database platform, that enables connections and relationships, as required. Some provision would also need to be considered for capturing spatial extent. LINZ’s business analysts are currently working on this and have been provided with relevant comments, as suggested.

With the Gazetteer spreadsheets, consideration will be taken on how best to annotate changes and may introduce a unique ID for the next publication of the spreadsheets on the LINZ website www.linz.govt.nz

As to the accuracy of coordinates, they are generally the coordinate or grid reference listed in the New Zealand Gazette that made the name official. There may be a need to clarify this point for users. The accuracy could be improved, and has been generalised for 1:50,000 topo mapping. To improve the accuracy for all official names to +/-5-10m for GPS users would not be possible.

Localities and suburbs that are currently being maintained by the New Zealand Fire Service are not publicly available. The review of the New Zealand Geographic Board Act looked at locality and suburb names, and intended to devolve the naming to Territorial Authorities, leaving the Board with a concurrence role. However, this did not eventuate in the 2008 Act, because it was identified that future ‘integrated address legislation’ would cover this off and that an amendment to the Act 2008 could be made in the future. For now the Board continues to have a role in assigning, altering, approving or discontinuing locality and suburb names – see item 16.27 on page 35 of the Board’s Frameworks document at http://www.linz.govt.nz/docs/placenames/nz-geographicbd/frameworks-nzgb-200809-ver2.pdf .

To recognise the importance of locality and suburb naming and the need to engage more fully with Territorial Authorities and the community, the Board’s membership will now include a person nominated from Local Government New Zealand. Also, a number of tasks and commitments have been identified, specifically relating to locality and suburb naming:

1. Research and collation of existing recorded suburb and locality names and supporting information in electronic form from existing sources.
2. Development of Code of Practice for official naming of Suburbs and Localities.
3. Secretariat administration to confirm proposed name concurrence with Code of Practice.
4. Gazette/newspaper advertising ongoing costs after initial naming.

Locality and suburb naming will be dealt with more fully by the Board in the near future.

For any queries, please contact Wendy Shaw, Secretary of the Board – wshaw@linz.govt.nz

Regards,

Wendy

1. Environment Canterbury GIS Beta blog. Not the first to the council GIS blogging game, but certainly early, is my local regional council in Canterbury. They’ve started a blog to engage with the community, and built their first mashup. This is a great step, and I’m excited to see more of the public GIS practitioners provide a means of direction communication and engagement with the communities they represent. Very exciting.
2. A reminder that whilst we’ve still got a long way to go, things could actually be worse.

Getting back to mashups, I believe that they are a nice simple and cost effective means of communicating simple geospatial needs to users – ECan’s swimming water quality mashup is an example of that – a simple means of seeing visually the quality of swimming places around Canterbury.

However, the real benefits are going to come when that information is freed from the encumberance of being tied to an Internet connection. Lots of recreational activities that we undertake are not always near Internet connectivity, and mobile data access is still prohibitively expensive to be checking these sort of data sources over summer when away from your computer and Internet connection.

As a very keen recreational user of handheld GPS for geocaching and other activities, I am ever hopeful that councils such as Environment Canterbury will start to consider making some of their underlyign data available for download so that it can be bundled into offline maps that can be used in car, auto and mobile phone, GPS devices.

This will complete the full loop – councils create our communities (geospatially at the very minimum), they record geospatial data about our communities, and with mashups – we are finally starting to get some of this geospatial data back.

I look forward to the day when councils are extremely open with the geospatial data and make it available so that we can put in our choice of portable mapping device

“Isn’t it the case that the USA doesn’t have an authoritative roading database, either? That’s why Navteq, TeleAtlas, and Google have to drive the roads.”

Whilst the US doesn’t have an authoritative roading database either, the release of the TIGER line shapefiles has spurred the development of free and open maps – e.g. the inclusion of Tiger data in OpenStreetMap, and the production of free and open maps for GPS units. This mirrors what has occurred in New Zealand with the likes of the NZ Open GPS Maps project, utilising the free information made available from Land Information NZ.

However, this leaves us with two broad types of maps both with their problems – commercial datasets with restrictive usage conditions and free datasets maintained by volunteers that may not be sustainable in the long term. In New Zealand, the commercial dataset providers are primarily Terralink, Critchlow’s and Eagle Technology, with some more affordable sets made available by Kim Ollivier. The free maps are primarily catered for by the New Zealand OpenStreetMap project and the NZ Open GPS Maps project.

My problem is that there is a lot of inefficiency in the current way that mapping data is managed in New Zealand (and this probably applies internationally). Why do we have four+ commercial sources for roading data and two volunteer driven projects all duplicating each other, as well as Government agencies that have legislative responsibilities for roading infrastructure?

Well, it is because LINZ is not currently funded to provide a centralised repository for all this information – they are too busy focusing on the cadestral database where they make their money. Instead we are producing inefficient silos of information, that are all subtly different. I have been prodding at a few people to try and get the NZ OpenStreetMap and Open GPS Maps projects to try and consolidate the underlying database to OSM, and I believe that this will occur over the long term, but there are a number of issues to work through before this will happen.

As Nat indicated in the original post – in the US Navteg, TeleAtlas and Google drive the roads there, and we’ve got at least Terralink, Google and probably others driving the roads here. In addition we have active volunteers also driving roads and correcting errors in OpenStreetMap and the Open GPS Maps project – I personally provide GPS tracklogs to OSM, and have also placed the 2007/8 High Speed Data Survey in there. The interesting part is that all of the errors are being corrected from the original LINZ roading dataset. So, because the New Zealand Government has not funded LINZ to maintain the roading dataset, make it widely available under permissive licensing terms, and allow feedback and corrections to be suggested for review and possible inclusion, we now have a massively inefficient approach to mapping roads in New Zealand.

All of these projects have sprung up because LINZ is not funded to provide the correct road dataset in the first place.

We can’t support that in a small country in New Zealand where only corporates, local authorities, and central government agencies can afford the commercial roading datasets due to expense. I know at least one of the commercial datasets costs over $100,000 to license. What this means is that small-and-medium sized businesses are being left out in the cold from using geospatial information to improve the way they do business as it is too expensive, and rate/tax-payers do not have affordable access to the information for tourism, recreational and safety purposes.

As the Immediate Past President of the NZ Recreational GPS Society, I’ve seen people balking in our forums at having to pay extra for decent road or topographical maps. Some of these are expensive because the GPS map vendor has needed to license the underlying data from a commercial provider. In addition to the cost, vendors also have to implement measures to stop the reverse-engineering and redistribution of this licensed data. However, like most forms of Digital Rights Management (some may say Restrictions), the technical mechanisms cause their own problems. I’ve just been helping with one person that has been suffering through Garmin’s Map Unlock process that is poorly communicated to customers, and provides nothing but roadblocks in an effort to set up the maps on the user’s computer and GPS. And even when he hopefully does have the maps unlocked, he will only be able to install them on one GPS!

Perhaps as a comparison, I am not able to download and install a copy of the Yellow Pages on my iPhone so that I can use it in a disconnected manner, but I can download the free and open Zenbu iPhone application that bundles all the data – so if for whatever reason I am out of mobile coverage, I can still use this data as it is stored locally on the device. I don’t believe that commercial directory services would be very comfortable about releasing their datasets to be installed on mobile devices, as they would risk the loss of their database in which the perceived value of their business resides. So having data released under permissive liceneses is also essential for new applications such as storing massive geospatial resources in our pockets.

That said, I’m not really in favour any more of the Government attempting to build a single massive dataset any more, as I think Government has proven that it cannot build these IT things effectively because there is too much management by committee, and the commercial vendors that provide the infrastructure are just looking for a jackpot if they win the tender (e.g. tender prices of $9-48 million for the failed National Address Register (NAR) project). I don’t see the need for the Government to build what is effectively their own OpenStreetMap infrastructure when we can just use something like OSM. Honestly, NZ Govt should just approach OpenStreetMap and look at an arrangement where Government can publish geospatial datasets into OSM with the ability to set some layers (such as say electoral and property boundaries which shouldn’t be editable) as read only, and the rest as editable – e.g. roads and walking tracks that can be maintained by everyone. If the publisher of a layer doesn’t want the original layer edited, then in some circumstances editable child layers should be allowed – e.g. so I can add a new walking track to a layer that hasn’t yet been updated to reflect it, and the owner of the original dataset can then look at whether they want to accept the change back into their layer.

Commercial geospatial datasets put nothing but roadblocks in the way for new and creative uses of geospatial data. I have no problem with commercial datasets providing value-add to the data, but the fundamental data such as roads and the like should be made as open and accessible as possible to encourage adoption and standardisation upon that dataset – this will also consolidate feedback and error correction. If I find an error now, I can’t report it to LINZ – they won’t listen. What benefit do I have in reporting a roading error to a commercial provider? Indeed the only benefit I get is if I report the error to a free and open project.

Adoption and standardisation of fundamental datasets are important to ensure consistency between map sets. Right now on my GPS I have two maps sets that both provide roads and you don’t have to look far to find discrepancies between the two datasets – but guess what, they are both derived from the LINZ road centrelines.

If left to commercial providers, geospatial data will be left as an expensive tool that only large organisations can afford.

The sooner governments in general recognise this, start funding the publishing and maintenance of fundamental datasets, the sooner we will see a real renaissance in how spatial information is used by the average organisation and individual. That is why I am so supportive of dc.gov releasing all their data.

Have you ever wanted to quickly find all the photos taken at your family bach? Chances are that unless you’ve been meticulous in filing your photos or tagging them with keywords, this could take quite a bit of time. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could click on your bach on a map, and bring up all of your photos within 1km, or display all of your holiday photos on a map? This is the promise of geotagging.

Simply put, geotagging records the latitude and longitude of the camera at the time the photo was taken and stores it in the image file.

Geotagging is not a new technology. It has been possible to geotag images for several years now, but previously only enthusiasts or professionals geotagged their photos, as it added extra steps to processing photos. It also required a GPS receiver that could record tracks – a breadcrumb trail of where the GPS had been. By matching the time in the GPS track log with the time that photos were taken, it is possible to reasonably estimate where the photo was taken. This took extra time and effort, and except for a dedicated few it was not worth the effort. The GPS receivers also added extra weight and bulk to carry around.

Recently GPS functionality has greatly shrunk in size and power demands, making it more friendly for the photographer by enabling the technology to be directly embedded in cameras and mobile phones.  Already a number of camera phones support geotagging photos – including much of the Nokia N series, and the recently released Apple iPhone 3G. Nikon has embedded a GPS receiver in their new Coolpix P6000 compact, and provide an optional GP-1 GPS attachment for recent Nikon digital SLR cameras. As more devices support geotagging, especially more affordable cameras and mobile phones, the possibilities (and the risks) are going to grow exponentially.

Combining GPS receivers with other devices makes the whole geotagging process transparent and automatic, and requires no effort from the user. This is going to rapidly open up opportunities for all sorts of geotagged data. But is it just technology for technologies sake? Not really, there are existing applications for geotagging, and even more to be come.

Travel photography just begs for geotagging. It is a great means of recording where holiday snapshots were taken, as you can easily show people where you took the photos. Not only that, but as people upload geotagged photos, they become a great travel planning tool as you can see photos that other have taken in a location that you are travelling to, and find sights nearby that you otherwise may have missed.

Real estate also stands to gain from geotagged photos – by being able to quickly load photos of properties for sale into an online searchable map, it will be easier to browse location and appearance at the same time. Councils and infrastructure companies have been using geotagged images for a number of years now to assist with managing assets – imagine being able to take a photo of a pothole and send the image to the council without having to try and explain where it is. Geotagging even has applications after a disaster – teams performing reconnaissance of an affected area can take geotagged photos whilst they are there, and when they return to an operations centre, the images and their exact location can be loaded into a mapping system to help authorities gain a better understanding of the extent of damage.

Location-based technology does come with inherent risks – mostly privacy related. Although many people are comfortable posting photos online, they may not be comfortable allowing people to determine the location where the photo was actually taken. This may be particularly relevant in the case of photos taken at home. No doubt we will see tools evolve to help people manage the privacy associated with geotagged photos, but in the meantime it is worth thinking about the content of a photo before uploading geotagged photos online.

The benefits of geotagging for the most outweigh the risks, and will likely lead to novel applications. The Apple iPhone 3G already has interesting applications taking advantage of geotagged images. Exposure provides mobile to Flickr – a photo sharing website. The ‘Near Me’ function will get your current GPS co-ordinates from the iPhone, and use that to display geotagged photos from Flickr that were taken near your current location. You can then view a photo, plot its location on a map, and if you desire, Google Maps will give you directions on how to get there.

Geotagged images don’t have to be shared online to reap the rewards – it may be that the biggest benefit is just providing another means of managing the vastly expanding data in your own photo library!

One angle I would like to extend upon, is Tim O’Reilly’s quote.

What if you don’t think of what you produce as the “final product” but rather as a step in an information pipeline, what do you do differently to add value for downstream consumers?

I think that this is a fundamental point that Government needs to get to grips with. When you look at government websites these days, most of them are designed around the philosophy of being just the terminal point of an information production chain – the result being information products expressed entirely in the form that the government agency ‘expects’ citizens to digest them. Most Government websites therefore only produce web pages, and pdf documents – they contain relatively little in raw data in a format that is more accessible for citizens. The exceptions of course are those agencies that have extensive mandates for publishing vast datasets such as Statistics New Zealand and Land Information New Zealand.

Laurence concludes his post with absolutely the correct next action required

…open up our content, expose our data so that it is easier to consume, rather than applying resources to redesign information dissemination. By creating objects that others can assemble we are likely to be significantly more successful at ensuring New Zealanders have access to the government information when, where and how they prefer.

A classic example is the recently released Atlas of Socioeconomic Deprivation in New Zealand (NZDep2006) published by the Ministry of Health. Whilst it contains a wealth of data, all of the downloadable forms from the website have been constricted by their publication in a read-only pdf format. The multitude of maps are all pdfs. The tables and reference information are in pdfs. This makes it near impossible to extract and utilise the data “when, where and how they prefer“. All is not lost however, I did contact MOH and they did provide a CD with a couple of hundreds MBs of data, including shapefiles for use within Geographical Information Systems. However, the licensing of the data is still somewhat unclear – Crown Copyright is not ideal terms, for example, to enable the republishing of the data by uploading it to a geospatial data hub such as Koordinates. What I mean to say is that it doesn’t allow automatic republishing without having to clarify conditions of use with the agency, in this case Health. If it were released under Creative Commons, then this would greatly speed the republication and disitrbution of the data. So, whilst the NZDep2006 data has been released, it is really not yet ready in prime time for wider Web 2.0 use.

This has also been replicated with Health’s Atlas of New Zealand’s District Health Boards. Using pdf’s to provide spatial data is admirable, but in this day of Google Maps or Earth – surely Government should be considering publishing data as KMZ’s or even live network services that can be loaded dynamically into a far richer and intuitive client than Adobe Acrobat.

Coming back to my point, SSC is certainly making all the right noises about where we should be going. However, right now, it appears to be left up to individuals like myself to actually go to agencies and say – “Hey, we’d actually like access to this data in a more reasonable format”.

What I would like to see is a mechanism whereby individuals such as myself, can instead approach SSC with a request to an agency, and the SSC will actually engage said agency to ensure agencies make said data available in a consistent manner across government.

I’m sure agencies would stand up and listen to someone making a request on behald of the Government CIO instead of a lone citizen or three. It would also mean that a consistent playbook could be promoted (Government Geospatial Information Web Access Guideline) that includes formats, hosting and most importantly licensing agreements by encouraging widespread adoption of the Creative Commons v3 NZ license.

For Government agencies to really start opening up their data, this needs to be driven from within Government, and only the SSC has the voice to be able to catalyse this process. Sure, individuals such as myself are engaging with success, and in some cases we’ll be able to obtain access – such as my recent win with Transit’s 2008 road survey trackpoint data. But for an individual to engage multiple agencies is very time consuming, and it is a slow process – especially when we are often cold calling and have to restate our case for publicly accessible data every time. And honestly, it is not something we as volunteers should have to be doing, this is really work that paid government personnel should be doing.

SSC needs to short-circuit this process by stepping up and creating an inter-agency mechanism to accept requests from citizens, and use the position of the SSC to engage, promote and ensure release of the data – whether spatial or not.

1. It is the right thing to do.
2. Because every neighborhood can benefit from 3D.
3. We get better 3D performance from the cloud and we don’t pay for it.
4. We want to communicate with our residents.

It kinda makes you sad to live in a country that doesn’t even see the value in being able to produce and maintain a national authoritative roading dataset, and here is local government saying – here is more than 200 geospatial datasets. Go for it. Download in ESRI or Google formats (I assume shapefile and KMZ). Not only that, but they appear to have a nice data warehouse for attribute data, as well as subscribable feeds for updates.

This is what is required for eGovernment – Government making the information available, in formats that support geospatial applications, with permissive licensing terms. It is also key to having residents take data and mash it up, and give it a life of its own. But that won’t happen until all the fundamental data about the places we live are released out into the electronic wilds.