[talk-au] New CC-BY datasets due Monday 28 September on Government 2.0 Taskforce website

[Brendan Morley]

Hello Aussie OSMers,

Those recently at the last OSM South Brisbane meetup may remember I was going to get onto our Department of Natural Resources people 
to see when they were going to release their datasets under a GILF (CC-BY compatible) licence.

It turns out there's been a little-publicised initiative within Federal Government called the Government 2.0 Taskforce @ http://gov2.net.au/

Note the blog post: http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/09/08/suggest-a-dataset-ideascale-competition-part-three/

"We are seeking your suggestions for datasets to be made available under the open access to public sector information principle (such as 
the Australian Toilet Map). These datasets will form the basis for our upcoming mashup competition."

Also: http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/08/13/hack-mash-and-innovate-contests-coming-soon/

"we are working to make some datasets from various jurisdictions available on open access terms and in formats that permit and enable 
reuse. If we find that an agency is willing to make data available but cant because of a legacy system, we will outline the technical 
requirements and post it as a challenge to build and open source a tool that will help that agency (and possibly others) 
liberate
 the data."

And the followup: http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/09/22/innovate-mash-camp-govt-2-0-contest-update/

"This is the one that I personally am most excited about. We are on track for launching this, possibly as early as next week. The combined 
forces of the Secretariat and my colleagues at DBCDE (thanks Judi and James) have been hard at work securing the agreement of at least 
12 (yep, count them) federal agencies and at least four (possibly more) out of our seven states and territories to release datasets for use in 
the contest & (drum roll) in RDF, XML, JSON, CSV or XLS formats and under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia license.
[...]
"We realise that data doesnt just mash itself up. We also want to bring the community together to share and collaborate. In an effort to do 
this, we are working on organising at least one mashup camp to be held in Sydney in late October/ early November. We also hope to hold 
one in Canberra in mid-October. Just to give yall a heads up that we are trying to give you a formal forum to get your innovative juices 
flowing to mashup the data that we have liberated."


It turns out this competition is indeed due to launch on Monday.  I can also say that the Queensland Government contribution to this 
competiton will be (data is in a range of formats, including DBF, PRJ, SBN, SBX, SHP & SHX):

1.       Queensland Wetlands Mapping - Streams 
2.       Queensland Wetlands Data - Wetlands & Estates Layer including National Parks, Conservation Areas & Forest Reserves etc. 
3.       Drainage Basins Queensland 
4.       Groundwater Observation Bore Sites 
5.       Surface Water Gauging Stations Queensland 
6.       Property Boundaries Annual Extract Queensland (Lite DCDB) 
7.       Local Government Boundaries Annual Extract Queensland

Other jurisdictions will also be releasing a smattering of datasets, they won't necessarily be the same themes.


Well I'm pretty excited to the point where I'm planning to host a WMS server for at least dataset #6.  It's about 2.1 million polygons, bless'em.  
If you lot promise not to DoS the server, I might even tell you the address once I get the CC-BY version of the dataset (-:

All we Qld OSMers need to do is use the "attribution=State of Queensland (Department of Environment and Resource Management) 2009" 
tag, as per CC-BY.  I presume it will be similar for other jurisdictions.


I'd like to acknowledge my contact at Qld DERM for this heads up.  However I'll leave him to introduce himself when the time's right.


Brendan (morb_au)