Australian Floods - Overview of online (mapping) resources

[Last updated 14 Jan 2011, 3:40 PM AEDST]

Source: smh.com.au 

There is an abundance of information and mapping resources springing up online to deal with the

ongoing Australian floods.

I have compiled an overview of online resources that can assist the affected communities in dealing with this disaster while it happens, and in the aftermath.

NOTE - RESOURCE LISTINGS HAVE BEEN MOVED TO REGION SPECIFIC PAGES:

• National Resources
• QLD Resources
• NSW Resources
• VIC Resources 

As resources will come and go, this will be a bit of a moving feast, but with your help, I will try & keep it as current and accurate as possible.

If you have any suggestions or links to be added, please comment below, or send me a tweet (@mvandervlugt) or email (mauritsrutger -at- gmail.com).

And please share these pages with others!

Vision on "SDI 2.0"

At last November's annual conference of the CRC for Spatial Information, I presented a vision on "SDI 2.0", or what Spatial Data Infrastructures will look like in the 21st Century.

There will be a shift from SDI 1.0: top-down, supply driven, slow and expensive initiatives, that mainly generate a flurry of (user-less?) YAPs (Yet Another Portal), to SDI 2.0, which is demand driven, mobile, crowd-sourced, cheap and immediate. In SDI 2.0, the default 'authoritative source' is no longer assumed to be a government department or large commercial provider.

SDI 2.0 will harness the forces of Web 2.0 and neo-geography, where there is less and less distinction between users and consumers of geodata. There will be a long tail of many producers of little amounts of data and small applications and mash-ups. This dramatically shifts the demands on government, industry and data providers, who ignore these trends at their peril.

You can watch the slides below, or download them here.

CRC-SI Soapbox Presentation on SDI 2.0

View more presentations from Maurits van der Vlugt.

PSMA, Sensis or OpenStreetMap: what makes Spatial Data “Authoritative”?

You are probably aware that recently in Australia, Google switched map data providers. They ditched the government owned data provider PSMA in favour of Sensis' Whereis, and this data will (at least in part) be maintained by users themselves.


The switch has created a bit of a stir in the Australian spatial information community. Our industry association (SIBA) sent out a stern word of warning about authoritative data and the risks of dealing with User Generated Content (UGC).