Victoria’s Version of Crime Stats

I have just come across “My Place – crime statistics for your area” page on the Victoria Police site. I presented several similar online crime reporting initiatives on this blog in the past so, one more example for the collection. Previously featured were UK crime statistics maps and several entries in Mashup Australia competition with NSW crime statistics.


The information is presented in summary format only (unlike details available in NSW crime data) and without the ability to compare “your area” to neighbouring locations. Statistics are available only for large geographic areas (eg. half a State) so definition of “your area” is rather … loosely interpreted. The following notice adds to the confusion as to what really "local area" means: “Please note that the statistics below are for your local Police Service Area, which covers an area with similar boundaries to your shire council.” It leaves too much to interpretation.

This is a perfect example of the dataset that would be best presented in “GIS” as well as tabular format and graphs. As yet, raw data is not available for download so no chances of adding value to this information.

Competition in mashup competitions

John Lenders, Victorian Minister for Information & Communications Technology, has just announced “App my State” mashup competition with $100,000 worth of prizes. It will be officially launched in late February so full details are not yet known.

It is a third such initiative within within a period of 5 months. First off the rank was Government 2.0 Taskforce with Mashup Australia competition (I featured many entries on this blog in a series of posts: winners of mashup competition or highlights part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4). Then late last year NSW government announced its own version of the contest: Apps4NSW (initially it was scheduled to end by 6th February but deadline was extended til 22nd March to allow more time for student entries). Other States will inevitably follow soon, not to be outdone.

Despite all of these initiatives and associated drive to free government data under Creative Commons licence, we are yet to notice any impact on the availability of useful applications. Majority of data released so far via, for example, data.australia.gov.au portal or data.nsw is only of marginal information value and mostly not in “ready reusable” formats. (How about property sales or vehicle registrations stats, Guys? Or cadastre boundaries and address database? That would really show your commitment to the cause! Otherwise it is just playing on the fringes...)

The benefits of all those competitions to the community and organisers will be directly related to the quality of data supplied. The two portals mentioned above highlight however one enormous problem that many tried to solve in the past , with various level of success: that is, consistent cataloguing and description of available data (via structured and standard compliant metadata) and simple way of discovering what is available (thematically as well as geographically). Google may offer some assistance in addressing this issue with simple yet powerful concept, as suggested by Ed Parsons. However, there is even bigger problem that should be addressed in the first place – national consistency of available information! You only need to look at how bushfire information is disseminated by each State to howl in despair… but it only requires 8 guys/galls to find a common ground. Maybe some money could be spent on such initiatives rather than on competitions where participants have access to only marginal value data?

MashupAustralia Winners Announced

After a month of deliberations, the winners of the contest for the Best Australian Mashup were finally announced. The overall winners, receiving $10,000 in prize money, are Suburban Trends and Know Where You Live (both were featured on all-things-spatial blog in the last few weeks: mashups pt 1 and winners of GovHack contest).

Judging panel citations:

“Suburban Trends - a mashup of different types of crime and census data that allows to compare and contrast suburbs by a range of economic, education, safety and socio-economic indicators. The judges thought the ability to compare suburbs visually combined with the selective choice of statistics was excellent especially in a field dominated by many entries using similar datasets.“

“Know Where You Live - This entry bills itself as a prototype of a mashup of a range of open access government data based on postcodes so that you can truly know where you live. The judges loved the very citizen-centric ‘common questions’ user experience of this app and the groovy, and again, selective repackaging of what could otherwise be considered (we’ll be honest here) slightly boring data. The integration of publicly-held historical photographs and rental price data was a nice touch as was the use of Google’s satellite images in the header. Judges were disappointed that some of the data for states other than NSW wasn’t available for inclusion. The focus on compliance only with the most modern standards compliant browsers was not seen as detrimental to this mashup.”

Highly Commendable Mashup award and $5,000 in prizes went to geo2gov (an online service that accepts location information in a variety of formats, like address, postcode, lat/lon, IP address, and returns data on that locations as JSON feed) and Firemash (mashup of relevant twits and New South Wales’ Rural Fire Service RSS feeds; it sends twitter alerts for registered users if fires are reported in the vicinity).




Notable Mashing Achievements ($2,500 prize) were awarded to:

• In Their Honour
• LobbyLens
• Flip Explorer

Best Student Entry and $2,000 in prize money was awarded to Suburban Trends (yes, again) and Suburb Matchmaker:



People’s Choice Award and $2,000 in prize money went to In Their Honour, with the following citation: “The clear winner of the People’s Choice Award was In Their Honour — which is consistent with the judge’s thoughts on its usability. As commenter Nerida Deane said, ‘I just looked up my Great Uncle Al and found the site easy to use and I liked the information it gave me. Maybe one day I’ll have a chance to visit his memorial.’”






Student Entry — Commendable Effort ($1,000 prize):

• Earth: Australia

• Community Rivers — River Health Monitoring

Transformation Challenge ($1,000 bonus prizes for mashups which enhanced and/or made the provided data available for reuse programmatically):

• geo2gov
• Neogopher
• absxml

Congratulations to all the winners and pat on the back for tens of other participants who submitted great entries for this competition! Full story at manshupaustralia.org and gov2.net.au blog.

Maps in Viral Marketing

A quote from the Australia Coastal Watch website reads:

“Unbelievable Satellite Images! Recent images of Bondi Beach show a massive school of unidentified sharks cruising just metres from swimmers. Click the plus symbol to zoom in…”

This is a fake of course but a very interesting example of a low cost viral marketing campaign for a TV program that plays on people’s fascination with “unusual things” captured on Google Map satellite imagery. I have spoiled the fun by describing what it is all about but the key point I want to make is that maps have such a wide range of potential applications - limited only to one’s imagination!

Related post: Adding value to free online maps…
First spotted on: Google Maps Mania

Favorite Places on Google

It is hard to keep up with all those new services that Google is rolling out! This latest initiative aims to make Google a significant player in location based services (LBS) market by bringing together businesses and consumers. In particular, Google has just started adding prominent businesses to its Favorite Places service and, at the same time, it sent out QR codes to over 100,000 businesses in the US encouraging them to display those codes in store windows. Customers can scan the QR codes with mobile phones and will be taken to the store's Favorite Places page, where they can read reviews. They can write a review and/or star the business as a favourite if they like the place. Alternatively, people browsing Favorite Places on the Internet can view the location of the featured business on a map.



Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania wrote a very comprehensive post on this latest service, outlining a new approach adapted by Google to ranking businesses. And Kevin Benedict from Mobile Strategies for Businesses has just published a related story on barcode scanners on mobile phones. Very interesting reading.

Google introduces Aerial View

Just recently I presented a new Australian entrant into the online mapping game: NearMap, with a very impressive application for viewing high resolution, multi-directional aerial imagery. Today Google announced the release of Aerial View option for Google Map API that allows viewing objects on the ground from four different directions (actually 5, if you count top-down satellite image as well). Current coverage includes only San Jose and San Diego in California, USA but more locations will be added in the coming months.



Google ensured that the new functionality also works with existing overlays, like hybrid streets layer and other Google Maps services like driving directions. As Google engineers put it, “…this is a result of a lot of code and computing power that reprojects the imagery to make it easy to overlay data on the map given lat/lon locations like in any other Google Map type. The result is a great user experience together with easy display of data on the map.”

Microsoft was the first to introduce the concept of multi-directional aerial imagery in online mapping applications with its Bing Map Brid’s Eye view option. And Bing Map already has quite a good coverage of Australian capital cities.


First spotted on: Google Maps Mania

Map of the future

Ordnance Survey, UK national mapping agency, has been trialling the use of lasers to create a detailed three-dimensional map of Bournemouth town centre. The map was generated from 700 million individual points cloud as part of a trial spanning three years, with every square metre of Bournemouth captured using a combination of land-based and aerial survey with high-accuracy lasers.

Glen Hart, Head of Research at Ordnance Survey, comments: “Three-dimensional maps in themselves aren't new, but what we've achieved in Bournemouth is a level of accuracy and detail that's never been done before. This technology could change the way we map the country, but also have a massive impact on things like personal navigation.”



Ordnance Survey says that it will be continuing with trials to help perfect the technology, but expects detailed mapping in three dimensions to be a reality within the next five years. On a small scale, similar maps can be easily created by anyone with digital photography and some help from Photosynth and Phyton scripts.


After: Ordnance Survey News Release