GIS.org.nz

An invite to an upcoming series of workshops...

You are invited to participate in the first of a number of workshops to help plan the development of the next version of the national Land Cover Database (LCDB).

The LCDB is a nationally significant database which is widely used throughout the country. It is a digital map created by grouping similar types of land cover which can identified from satellite images. There are currently two versions in circulation depicting New Zealand’s land cover in 1996-97 and 2001-02. A third version is proposed which will use the mapping output from the Ministry for the Environment’s Land Use and Carbon Analysis System (LUCAS) programme as a base. This mapping is based on satellite data over the summer of 2007-08.

We need your input to scope the new version of the LCDB and makeit relevant for today’s needs. The workshop will be of interest to policy makers, land managers, researchers and analysts –anyone with an interest or a stake in land cover information.

More workshops will be held during February 2009 in Hamilton, PalmerstonNorth, Christchurch and Dunedin.

The first workshop is being held in Wellington. Tuesday 16 December, 2008 from 1-4pm at Environment House, 23 Kate Sheppard Place, Wellington.

(pdf here)

The conference programme for GeoCart'2008 has been released. I've just added this to the calendar, and for those that don't know, GeoCart'2008 is being held at the University of Auckland on the 1st to the 3rd of September. More details are available on their website.

The New Zealand Geospatial Office quietly sprung onto the Internet in the last 24 hours. Good to see they provide a couple of RSS feeds that will be aggregated here in due course. The content management system for the website appears to be the free and open source Silverstripe. Even better is a news release promoting our feed aggregation that we recently set up here :)

Also noted is a significant update to the LINZ website (press release) and NZTopoOnline has also seen a refresh - although it is not immediately obvious what changes have been made to NZTopoOnline.

It's not necessarily spatial, but there is a lot of good and relevant work going on in the eGovernment space. To make it easier to find some of these, I've created a news aggregation feed that points at these eGovernment resources.

The Ministry of Health recently released the Altas of Socioeconomic Deprivation (NZDep2006). PDF maps are available from this Atlas's homepage on the Ministry's website, but shapefiles aren't directly available from the website. A free CDROM is available that contains shapefiles - as well as all the reports. I received my CDROM a couple of days ago and it contains the following layers - CensusAreaUnit, DistrictHealthBoard, NZ_Outline,NZDep2006, and TerritorialAuthority.

In an email out late last week John from the NZ Geospatial Office announced the following...

Hi All
The New Zealand Geospatial Office is pleased to announce that John Clegg from ProjectX has been awarded second prize for his Mashup - Crime 10K.

Check out Crime 10K @ http://blog.projectxtech.com/page/2/ or http://www.gis.org.nz/wiki/Geospatial_Mash-up_2008_Participants

Cheers
John

Congratulations to John, not only for winning a prize, but for also actually completing a working solution! :) Thanks also to the New Zealand Geospatial office, and the other central and local government organisations that rallied around the mashup.

After the strong turnout at the initial Mashup meeting at the start of May, it is disappointing, but perhaps not unexpected to have so few completed entries. I wonder if the short time frame - e.g. less than 2 months from discussions to submission resulted in too tight a timeline, especially as those that have the skills to mash something up in a short time are probably quite busy with work already? I hope that the Geospatial Office does not lose heart from the low number of submitted entries. I would have liked to have played with the data in Sahana, but I think Sahana needs another 6-12 months before it will be ready to support that, and I certainly wasn't in a position to currently build something from scratch!

Perhaps a competition needs more time to be run? Given that most participants would be doing it as a voluntary effort anyway it may need a 3-6 month timeframe to get more teams participating.

Alternatively, perhaps we look at moving away from a competitive, team-based, do-it-in-your-own-time approach, and try something like a soild 2 days to work through some geospatial issues or a particular theme to provide some focus - for example a mashup to bring a pile of different GIS systems together and work on interoperability around a certain issue. My favourite would be around a disaster scenario as that provides a very dynamic environment where lots of new data is being produced, and mashups are needed to aggregate data from many different organisations, and it is needed in a timely manner.

Who knows? Perhaps trying to get it all nailed in one weekend, or a combined Friday/Saturday (one day off work, one day of weekend) may be a lot easier for most. It also has the added benefit of throwing a pile of people in the same room(s) and setting them to a task, rather than providing an independent, work-at-your-own-pace challenge.

I'd be interested to hear some comments on this issue!

One of the benefits of moving to the ProjectX servers has been the ability to better integrate RSS feeds and the like into the website. One interesting new twist on this has been the release of the 'nz data announce' feed. The first data feed to be piped in here is the 'recently added layers' feed from http://koordinates.com/. I'd like to thank Ed Corkery from Koordinates for implementing a feed that we could subscribe to and publish any new data.

I would like to encourage any other organisations that are publishing or releasing data sets to consider publishing a feed to enable easy aggregation of new spatial data sources in New Zealand. Additionally, we will probably look at creating our own announce feed on here that we can manually announce new spatial data sources.

Of course, we'd prefer that if you release data sets regularly, or they are updated often, that you publish a feed in preference, and let us know so that we can subscribe the aggregator to it.

We've set up a feed aggregation so that you can more easily keep an eye on what is happening in the geospatial world here in New Zealand, as well as globally.

Our initial focus is on the gis blogs, and these have been split into global and New Zealand (or Kiwi overseas). Over time we would like to create others, and these may include vendors press releases, product announcements etc.

I have also included an aggregator group for eGovt blogs in New Zealand, as there is often relevant material to the geospatial profession being raised, and I think we also need to push location more for eGovt.

The MapInfo New Zealand User Group have released their Call for Presentations for the annual User Group conference to be held in Wellington in September. More details are contained in the attached pdf.

By telling your GIS story, you’re communicating your best practices, successes, and innovative GIS applications with others who face the same day-to-day challenges. We look forward to hearing about your exciting work in the following areas.

• Pitney Bowes MapInfo
• Case Studies
• Local Government
• Web mapping
• Transportation
• Civil Defence
• Retail
• Application Development

Authors will present a 20 to 30 minute live presentation as part of the 2008 MUGNZ Conference. Abstracts and papers will also be published as part of the conference proceedings.

The first of a few conference announces we're going to circulate here. Yes, I know this one starts today. Note that we will also be including conferences in the gis.org.nz calendar as well.

How GIS can transform organisations
23 & 24 June 2008. Duxton Hotel, Wellington.

This unique and inaugural event will focus on the ability of GIS systems to provide true value through enabling practical solutions to enhance business performance. The event will feature innovative uses of GIS systems from around New Zealand, and how GIS tools are used to provide real business benefits across a range of industries.

The programme will take you through the journeys many organisations have overcome and the challenges associated with GIS to help integrate the tools into everyday business processes. Numerous case studies will demonstrate how results can be achieved and provide plenty of practical solutions to the big issues. Explore lessons learned and make sure you are on the right path to success.

For more in-depth information and hands-on learning, there are also separately bookable half-day workshops:
Gaining Buy-in for Investment in GIS
Developing and Implementing Processes that Ensure Data Quality and Integrity

To view the programme in its entirety, please click on the following link:
http://www.brightstar.co.nz/nz/inaugural-geospatial-information-systems-summit.html