Victoria launches VisualPlace pilot - demonstrating the value of sharing geospatial data

I was alerted to the release of VisualPlace at the start of this week, and have spent the last few days playing with the site to get a feel for its potential.

From the site, VisualPlace's purpose is to,

...show the value of an interactive GIS-enabled service for the visualisation of location-based government information.

The site will test the appetite for online Graphical Information Systems (GIS) showing government data and both demonstrate what is possible and seek user feedback on what the public would like to see in such tools.

VisualPlace takes a wide variety of already publicly available data from sources such as the ABS and Vic Health and merges it into a layer-based view over a map of Victoria.

This makes the site highly versatile, you can search for services, transport links and health or educational information as well as check out population and economic data from across the state. These can be mapped as heat maps, 'vertical extrusions' or 'shaded icons' across local government areas or the entire state.

VisualPlace is also inviting people to submit ideas for additional data sets to model and is asking government agencies to make their data available to make the experience richer and more useful.

The site is built using Microsoft Silverlight - which may limit its reach due to Silverlight's low penetration rates. In fact it is possible that many large corporate and government offices do not yet include Silverlight as part of their standard desktop environment and it doesn't always work correctly across all major web browsers.

My only other concern is with the range of options available compared to the ease of use of the interface. There's simply so many selections - data to view, filters, visualisation techniques - that an average user may become confused or may simply not realise what is possible.

If the interface can be simplified I believe more people will find the application useful. For example by having three buttons for the different visualisation approaches that show pictures of what they do and can be easily clicked between rather than having them hidden in dropdowns without explanation of the end result.

Overall this is a very important experiment for government and hopefully will be widely promoted in order to gather as much intelligence as possible.

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Victorian government commits to Creative Commons licensing for up to 85% of public sector information

It's going to be a Victorian Government day today in my blog, with the state launching a number of Gov 2.0 based initiatives, from their 'Apps my State' competition to VisualPlace (see my post Friday afternoon).

Significantly, Victoria's government has made a commitment this week to use Creative Commons as the default copyright licensing system for public sector information.

There's a good post about the decision over at the Creative Commons Australia website, Victorian Government commits to CC licensing.

Even more interesting reading, however is the actual statement by the Victorian government, which was in response to the Economic Development and Infrastructure Committee’s Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data.

This provides some of the reasons for the move - and outlines the challenges the government believes they will face in implementing it.

One of the foremost benefits outlined was economic, with the Victorian Government expecting increased commercial activity. This reflects finding from other countries as well as within Australia where, for example, the ACIL Tasman report (PDF) found that another $0.5 billion could have been added to national GDP and consumption in 2006-07 if constraints on the reuse of spatial data were removed.

A second benefit was supporting scientific research. By allowing researchers to access primary data across disciplines, the government is helping them accelerate discoveries and insights.

The third major benefit outlined was government transparency - which is a pre-requisite for making governments more accountable to the people they serve.

The Victorian Government reckoned that up to 85% of public sector information could be licensed for re-use, and acknowledged that the Victorian public service has a large job ahead of it, with some fundamental changes in culture and processes required to change the default position from 'no reuse' to 'reuse permitted'.

The cultural aspect was highlighted very clearly, with the statement that,

These reforms will require much more than a change to process and procedures to be successful. It will require a fundamental shift in the attitude and thinking of Victoria’s public servants.

Given that we have a more than a hundred year tradition of data protection this, in my view, is the biggest shift required to implement the Victorian Government's agenda and will take time and some pain to overcome.

It will be extremely interesting to watch what types of 'first mover advantage' is granted to Victoria if it makes a swift and clean transition to open licensing of public sector data - although we may not get the opportunity as some other states have been moving in a similar direction, at varying speeds. To be fair, Queensland was the first Australian state to mandate Creative Commons licenses and has done significant work in the area. However there wasn't a clear mandate from the Government and implementation has not, as yet, been widespread.

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Victoria launching $100,000 'Apps my state' competition to create open data applications

Following the lead of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce's MashupAustralia and NSW's Apps4nsw competition (which runs until 24 March), Victoria's Minister for Information and Communications Technology, John Lenders, has announced the 'Apps my state' competition.

In his media release, Minister Lenders said that,

"App My State is a competition to encourage software developers and members of the public to create web or mobile applications using Victorian Government data.

"We’re looking for the cream of Victoria’s innovative and hi-tech communities to come up with new and helpful ways to use this information – an added incentive for local talent to develop their ideas for fellow Victorians.

"Applications will be judged for their innovation, design and development, usefulness, accessibility and general excellence."

Victoria already has range of data available that would be usable in the competition, hopefully with more to come.
The competition will launch in late February at the Victorian Premier's website.

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South Australian Premier vows to repeal internet censorship over election comments

As a follow-up from my post yesterday,South Australia bans anonymous election comments online, South Australia Premier Mike Rann has twittered that the South Australian government has decided to repeal the January 6 amendment to the state's Electoral Act which made it illegal to publish anonymous comments online during an election campaign.

Reported in a post in Ars Technica, Internet uprising overturns Australian censorship law (which is an excellent read), South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson sent a statement yesterday to AdelaideNow, where many citizens were protesting the new law, stating that,

"From the feedback we've received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened. I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively... It may be humiliating for me, but that's politics in a democracy and I'll take my lumps."

Note that I assume this statement is based on the assumption that the present South Australian government is re-elected. If another party wins power, the law may stand.

Australian online pundits are labelling this a victory for democracy over censorship and I expect to see the example of South Australian's decision used by opponents to the Australian federal government's planned mandatory internet filter.

I've included the key tweets from Premier Rann's validated twitter account below...

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Google to end support for Internet Explorer 6 during 2010

Google has announced that it will progressively end support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 during 2010 - beginning with Google Docs and Sites in March. Youtube, another Google company, is also phasing out support.

Announced in the Google Enterprise blog post last week, Modern browsers for modern applications, Google Apps Senior Product Manager, Rajen Sheth, said that the web had evolved in the last ten years from simple text pages to rich interactive applications and that very old web browsers cannot run these new features effectively.

This approach isn't limited to Google. A number of companies have already dropped support for Internet Explorer 6.0 in their online applications and more, including Facebook and Digg, plan to drop it in the near future.

Microsoft (up to CEO level) have also advocated dropping the IE6 web browser for their latest version, Internet Explorer 8.

EDIT at 8:10AM 3/2/09:
Nick Hodge, a Microsoft staff member, has commented on this post that Microsoft is also progressively dropping IE6 support, saying that Microsoft has,

dropped support for IE6 in Sharepoint 2010 and the forthcoming web versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote 2010; plus live@edu and other web properties. 

END EDIT

However, to support its customers, as there are a number of major corporations still tied to the ageing browser, Microsoft recently extended support for IE6 until April 2014, when all support for Windows XP ends.

Given the recent severe security issues reported with IE6 and the increasing proportion of the internet unavailable to those using the 2001 vintage web browser, I hope to see the remaining organisations migrating away from the browser in the near future.

It is estimated that only 20% of web users - predominantly workers in large organisations - still use IE6, however up to 50% of Chinese internet users are still on the web browser.

Reportedly Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser has been losing market share at least 2004, when it reached 90% of the market. According to Wikipedia's Usage share of web browsers article, it is now estimated (through tracking subsets of internet users) that only about 60% of internet users are on one of the Internet Explorer variants, with Firefox 3.5 having overtaken IE8 as the most popular browser by version.

Some commentators expect to see Microsoft's share of the web browser market fall below 50% by mid-2011.

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