NICTA: National Map

Project Details

The National Map Beta is a project developed by the National Information Communications Technology of Australia (NICTA) which is akin to other technologies such as Google Maps and Bing Maps. NICTA uses this software to display survey data about the country, such as tax information, government boundaries, and geological formations. The National Map was designed so that anyone can add their own data to the map, but for this to work the data needs to be formatted correctly.

Our first task was to get transportation data for New South Wales, AU to display on the map. We accomplished this by joining geographic data hosted on NICTA's GeoServer with the data provided, and then using Quantum Geographic Information System (QGIS) to create a shapefile and export it as a KML file, which can be displayed in the National Map.

Once we accomplished this, we were given transportation data for Victoria, AU and a goal of having the data for New South Wales and Victoria display together on the map. However, where the New South Wales data was aggregated categorically based on Local Government Areas (LGAs), the Victoria data was still in large, raw data formats. To manage this data, we wrote scripts to import this data into a PostgreSQL server and aggregate it to match the New South Wales data format. We then joined it with the New South Wales data and applied the same steps to the combined file as we had to the New South Wales data originally, allowing us to visualize both data sets on the National Map from one source file.

This process is summarized in the following infographic:

Team Members

Ted Friedman, Eric Krenz, Sean Luthjohn, Jordan Steffan