Has it been two months and I’ve missed an election?

What a busy two months it has been, an election, almost a result, the launch of new and exciting products, location based marketing making it to the main stream (see Gruen Transfer Season 3 Episode 8: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/gruentransfer/watch.htm)

As I missed updating throughout the 2010 election (although who knows, another might be coming up?) I wondered where all the election promises and spend would be most affected. An interesting mashup indeed but alas I could not find one. The best use of spatial data covering the election that I could find came from our good friends at the ABC with a little help of Google Maps. The ABC Interactive Map (http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2010/map/) really made it easy to keep track of how each electoral seat is currently fairing. It is a fantastic mix of AEC data, address verification, modelling and presentation.

Other interesting sites were the Tally Room (http://www.tallyroom.com.au/election-2010) and of course our good friends at NuMaps (http://demos.numaps.com.au/myElectorate.html). These sites have done a good job of linking to one another and while on the Tally Room I got stuck on opening up many KML links to Google Earth for Australia and other countries. Who would have thought politics was so interesting?

NuMaps is increasingly becoming the source of truth for heaps of demographic information (that just happens to be location aware). So successful has been the Google/NuMaps integration that it recently won the Apps4NSW mash-up competition.

Yet, with these useful and insightful mashups I yet to find one that pinpoints exactly where each election promise will be affected and where the money is going. I’m sure a powerful map highlighting this information would be a powerful tool indeed.

Still, while the election draws out I can only wonder how the next generation of politicians will be interacting with their constituents. Surely with the rise of popular social mediums and interactivity what will our expectations be? Log an issue online, pinpoint it to a map (location) and wait for the politician to respond? I’ve seen more targeted pitches to win voters and so is the next step personalised pitches based on location? Time will only tell.

Urban Planning in the 21st Century

Over the last few months the new CRC-SI 2 has been kicking into motion and positioning itself for the research areas the new program will be looking to achieve. For those who have been involved no doubt you are aware of the history of the CRCSI but for those who are not up on the current lingo, the CRCSI is short for the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information and ‘2’ is the second round of funding that the organisation has received from the federal government.

With this second round of funding the CRCSI will be able to work for the next seven years around the theme of Spatially Enabling Australia. The core research areas are Positioning, Automated Spatial Information Generation and Spatial Infrastructures. See this handout for more information.

As part of the CRCSI 2 work programs there are a number of application areas that will also be looked into and one has stuck my interest. The Sustainable Urban Planning (program 4.5 pdf: here) organisers recently held a seminar on the subject of Greyfields.

“Greyfields are the ageing occupied residential tracts of suburbs that are physically, technologically and environmentally obsolescent……..typically found in a 5 to 25 kilometre radius of the centre of each capital city”‘ Professor Peter Newton.

With population growth, affordable housing and increase need for better government spending the rejuvenation of these areas of urban living must be proving a great challenge. What I feel will be key for this research theme is the engagement of community on urban planning as it was highlighted that within ‘greyfields’ most of the land is under private ownership. This proves an interesting sticky point for redevelopment in light of current issues.

As housing affordability and population growth are hot topics and that urban sprawl is becoming more and more unsustainable the greyfields are key to helping address these problems. In another session I attended recently titled ‘Boom Town 2050’ it was highlighted that the density of dwellings in Australia is not at the levels it needs to be to support population growth. Hopefully with research, engagement with community and importantly action the use of spatial within this area will be seen as critical to realising and communicating what needs to be done.

GSDI 12 – Embracing Social Media

For those who are into Spatial Data Infrastructures you are know doubt aware of GSDI 12 (Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association) which is occurring in Singapore later this year. This conference is the 12th running and is themed ‘Realising Spatial Enabled Societies’ and I highly recommend attending as with the growth of social media, societies seem only one (large) step away from fully realising the benefits of location/spatial in day to day operations.

It is with great interest on the promotion of this even that the organisers have embraced twitter (@GSDI12) and is even using You Tube as a means to market what is happening for GSDI. As a twitter user I have been following the thread with great interest and glad to see that the updates come thick and fast throughout the weeks and are not intermittent. This keeps it fresh in my mind and even leads me to blogging about it.

Usage of social media as a means of business marketing in my mind I feel is underutilised in Australia. A statistic that I came across this morning is that 75% of SME do not use social media to advertise their business, (http://bit.ly/dynJtA) yet I find the potential to connect people to place via these mediums allows marketing spend to be targeted to those demographics businesses want to attract. It is with this last thought that I sit back and reflect on the importance of spatial/location. Yes as an industry we realise the importance on adding location as a tag into all data types although listening to a colleague yesterday, if we want to realise a spatially enabled society we need to draw out the benefits to those outside of our industry in a simple, clear way. When comparing adding location tags to data against other tags such as gender, age, nationality, what takes precedence in determining where our limited resources in data collection go?

Technology is enabling the embedding of location to become simpler. Simple user interfaces, better data infrastructures and enabling technologies to bond data between the business and the user is happening. Data infrastructures built on spatial technologies could become a key enabler for social media to expand out from current mass media and advertising markets. Imagine collecting bird sightings through a social media page rather than separate websites to track where endangered species are located in order to facilitate discussion on urban planning. Social media pages such as facebook currently get more ‘visits’ than the Google home page. In planning data infrastructure the time is right to ensure that the information being linked can also link to social media in order to enable the innovative use of data within these sites.

We are good at linking data and we need to get better at linking into current trends and enabling better evidence to be used online. I’m sure there will be many discussions in this space at GSDI 12. I look forward to seeing you there.

Why Spatial Data Will Fail:

Fail is a hard word; maybe using the statement that Spatial Data will never quite reach its potential would be a better way of summing up the title of this post. I have for the last few months been participating in a strategy document for Western Australia related to the power of location. This strategy document looks at how information can be used to benefit the future development of the state where embedding location into data becomes a recognised core element to expanding and deriving value out of the linked data concept. (see http://linkeddata.org/)

What I have really learnt from this experience is that ‘Spatial’ is unknown; an elusive term whose understands is limited to those geeks sitting in the dark corner of ones office. The other side of the coin is that data is meaningless until you link this data with other bits to draw out useful information that can be easily understood.

Reading recent updates on how much data is generated per year and how the numbers are becoming astronomical. All Things Spatial Blog In 2010 the amount of data generated will pass the Zettabyte level, something that I know my computer will gladly roll over, hand in its resignation and retire to some distant silicon oasis. Let’s just say that a Zettabyte is equivalent to 75 billion fully-loaded 16 GB Apple iPads

With that much data being generated yearly there is no doubt that most of it is unintelligent and would be difficult to mine, massage it all into a useful form.

So, if you take ‘spatial’ on its own and ‘data’ on its own they are both pretty meaningless. The Power of Location strategy for Western Australia takes its aim from others around the world such as the UK Location Strategy: Place Matters where ‘everything happens somewhere’ although we can add to this by including ‘and sometime’. The need to look at how information is collected in a variety of sectors and identifying and embedding a location element in it will help in the areas of data mining and massaging ensuring that the right information can be generated when needed relating to the right area.

Information is what gets delivered in applications, in reports and help makes those critical decisions that are needed. Data that is spatially enabled (i.e. has a location) provides the links to other types of data including environmental, social and economical. A triple bottom line effect on how data is collected managed and used to derive information will ensure that ‘spatial’ is catapulted into peoples consciousness as data needs to relate to it’s surroundings at a particular location.