Thanks to Ross Johnson, who sends keeps me up to date with industry news.
Google is unleashing an army of cyclists to capture images off the beaten track
and in pedestrian-only locations. Sydney Morning Herald Article
Google goes off road
Campsites?
A friend is planning a trip around Australia and has found there is no single place to get information about camping grounds. Google has a category of caravan parks (but only a few dozen throughout Australia) and some camping but it is all mixed up with scout camps and boot camps. There must be lots of datasets in different places – National Parks, camping and caravans nsw have some, but by no means a definitive list. Not easy to find your way around either. Then when you cross to another state its a whole new search. It is a classic candidate for a Mashup. I went looking and found a brilliant site in the US at Recreation.gov – it even tells you where you can take your horse! (not many places) http://www.recreation.gov/campgroundSearchResult.do?topTabIndex=CampingSpot
Most popular government datasets
During the recent mashups australia competition the most visited datasets on the data.australia.gov.au site were
- Location of Centrelink Offices (http://data.australia.gov.au/80)
- National Public Toilet Map (http://data.australia.gov.au/610)
- Australian Federal Electoral Boundaries (http://data.australia.gov.au/27)
- NSW Rural Fire Service – Current Incidents (http://data.australia.gov.au/575)
- Frog Atlas – SA (http://data.australia.gov.au/570)
- NSW Crime Data (http://data.australia.gov.au/365)
- NSW Rural Fire Service – Major Updates (http://data.australia.gov.au/573)
- Mildenhall photographs of early Canberra (http://data.australia.gov.au/77)
- ACT – Barbecue (BBQ) Locations (http://data.australia.gov.au/18)
- Location of Medicare offices (http://data.australia.gov.au/66)
Planning alerts for your locality
You’d probably know if your next door neighbour was going to knock their house down (you’d get a letter through the door telling you they had applied for planning permission and asking you what you thought about it). But you’d probably never find out if the old cinema or pub 5 streets away is going to be converted into luxury flats until the bulldozers turned up.
PlanningAlerts.org.au is a free service which searches as many planning authority websites as it can find and emails you details of applications near you. The aim of this to enable shared scrutiny of what is being built (and knocked down) in peoples’ communities.
PlanningAlerts.org.au is brought to you by the OpenAustralia Foundation with financial assistance from the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce. It was adapted for Australia by Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska, and is based on the UK site PlanningAlerts.com, built by Richard Pope, Mikel Maron, Sam Smith, Duncan Parkes, Tom Hughes and Andy Armstrong.
Google maps API tutorial
There is a free online tutorial for the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API).
Useful training and information.