SDI technology wins Australian "Apps4NSW" competition

Australian-based NuMaps has been awarded joint first prize winner in the inaugural Apps4NSW mashup competition for their DemographicDrapes web application. The Gov 2.0 competition was held in New South Wales, Australia.

At an awards presentation the Minister for Science and Medical research, Jodi McKay, said the aim of the Apps4NSW competition was about finding new and useful ways to deliver Government information to the public via the internet and mobile devices. “We know that more and more people are getting the information they need via mobile phones, computers and other mobile devices,” Ms. McKay said. “Applications and ideas that allow people to access and compare information about their local communities were the big winners.”

The competition attracted 122 entries. After much deliberation the judging panel decided to award equal first place to Brad Spencer for his DemographicDrapes application and the Smart Mashups team for their Suburban Trends application. “Our DemographicDrapes application is based on two distinct components – the browser application itself and the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) published by NuMaps,” Brad Spencer said. “Anyone could have developed their own mashup application against our spatial data service and in fact we would encourage people to do this next time.”

The actual mashup is a GoogleMaps-like application - allowing users to locate their map view to anywhere in Australia via a range of navigation tools. They can then select from a sample range of DemographicDrapes based on ABS Census 2006 data to overlay and zoom into specific suburbs to analyse different demographic themes such as age, housing, marriage, religion, gender and heritage population distributions. The user can also upload their own eXcel spreadsheet data and superimpose it on top of the demographics (such as monthly sales figures, etc.) “This really does provide the remote web user with an affordable analysis tool that both allows them to conveniently access publicly published demographics as well as integrate their own more private data sets.” Spencer said.

The underlying SDI powering DemographicDrapes leverages the Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS) international standard and CubeWerx servers. Numaps also provides connectivity for Gaia from The Carbon Project so customers can combine DemographicDrapes with other data sets, wherever they come from.