Australian Mashup Competition Round-Up

MashUpAustralia
The MashupAustralia competition is now closed. There has been an amazing 78 entries and the vast majority of the entries involve maps. Over at the All Things Spatial blog Arek has started to review all the map related mashups.

Arek has kindly allowed me to republish some of the highlights from his round-up. However, if you want to see the full round-up, which includes those mashups that use other map API's, you should head over to All Things Spatial.


Victoria: Fire Ready

Depicts locations of fire brigades and police stations in the vicinity of a chosen address. Distance circles of 10, 25 and 45km from the address are marked to allow users to discern how quickly aid can arrive in case of emergency. The application also plots incidents reported by Victorian Country Fire Authority as well as current weather and wind conditions from the Bureau of Meteorology.

FireMash
Firemash is an attempt to match official announcements from NSW Rural Fire Services with incidents reported by a community via Twitter. Users can plot location of their houses on the map and if any incidents are reported in the vicinity, the application will retweet the information to alert the user. Interesting concept although its usefulness will be difficult to demonstrate at the moment because there are no fires reported in the entire NSW!

AuScope Portal

This map built with Google Maps and using OGC web services (WMS and WFS) feels like a fully featured online GIS but I found it a bit cumbersome to use (I had real difficulties in displaying and removing layers and especially managing order of layers for display). Great collection of geology related information though!

LocateMe

This application was submitted by the Western Australia Landgate crew. It presents demographic profiles for areas of interest and lists government services available in the area. It uses Google Map as a background layer but is built with OpenLayers - it certainly does not behave like a real Google Map. Once again, the application is styled as a fully featured online GIS with traditional navigation tools - which makes it rather awkward to use (ie. no double click to zoom, no zoom slider tool, requires selection of buttons to either zoom in or out or pan). It could have been quite an interesting application if it wasn't for so many layers being restricted with a password. And I couldn't get demographic profiles to load at all.

Data Aggregator
This is a very slick and well built Google Map application that displays almost all datasets released for the MashupAustrlia competition, and more. It is easy to navigate and certainly much easier to use than any of the above mentioned mapping mashups. Which is quite surprising since the application is using hierarchical and expandable layer selector, very similar to the other applications mentioned today. A unique feature of Data Aggregator is a couple of custom controls for changing display options for markers and vector overlays.

To be continued…

Cross posted from All Things Spatial

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