Geospatial Mash-up 2008

Author: John Forne
Date: 19 August 2008

The New Zealand Geospatial Office recently teamed up with some of New Zealand's leading technical experts and budding enthusiasts in geospatial data and held a bar camp (pictured) and mash-up competition.

The purpose of the mash-up competition was to showcase new and innovative ways of using geospatial information about New Zealand. The mash-up involved combining (mashing-up) data, including census data from Statistics NZ, with topographic maps and coming up with new ways of visualising this information.

Prior to kicking off Geospatial Mash-up 2008, the office held a bar camp (an open workshop for generating ideas) on 1 May at Toi Poneke, Wellington Arts Centre. The purpose of the bar camp was to discuss how the mash-up might be arranged. In addition to finalising this, a key achievement of the bar camp was the establishment of a relationship between the office and geospatial data enthusiasts.

So who won?

The mash-up competition attracted strong interest. However, John Clegg from Project X was the only competitor who managed to fulfill the competition's demands with a complete and working solution - congratulations John! John's entry, Crime 10K, showed the number of recorded offences for every 10,000 residents across New Zealand, highlighting the crimes by colour over New Zealand's different police regions.

Thank you!

A big thanks to all the people who supported the bar camp and Geospatial Mash-up 2008, including Statistics New Zealand; Ian Tidy of the Napier City Council; IBM; the State Services Commission; the Spatial Sciences Institute; and last but not least, everyone who came along to the bar camp and entered the mash-up competition.

We've received valuable feedback and we're thinking about how to run a bigger and better mash-up event next time. Keep the feedback coming with any suggestions, criticism or praise of what has been achieved so far.

For what else is coming up, you can check out our Events section.