Making better use of envrionmental data
A recent presentation by Peter Toome from Adcon Telemetry Australia at the Living Laboratories Workshop on Emerging Technologies in Environmental Monitoring highlighted to me the rapid increase in interest and capability in using the magic of the internet to distribute, collect, display and analyse environmental data.
Other examples include:
- Sahul-time – is a Monash University research project that presents an interactive model of the Australia/PNG continent over the last 100,000 years. A control panel allows a user to quickly move back and forwards through time. As you do, the coastline changes, showing how we were once linked to Papua New Guinea. Scientists are adding links to their archaeological data, so that now a user can find what archaeological data exists at various timescales in Australia’s history
- nrmSPACE has been developed by the South East Natural Resource Management Board as a tool for environmenal managers in this region of South Australia. It includes a database of research publications, an online collaborative space and most impressively, an interactive map that links a user to environmental datasets relevant to the region.
- Jim Rowe from SRA Information Technology also gave a presentation at the Living Laboratories workshop on Emerging Technologies in Environmental Monitoring. His presentation demonstrated how data could be collected and displayed on a GIS interface in real time. SRA won the Telstra Business of the Year award in 2007. Well done Jim!
- Mike Seyfang recently drew my attention to a new innovation by education.au Ltd Australia called openDSM, a lightweight fast search protocol across multiple distributed education repositories (digital libraries, cultural image libraries, metadata repositories, learning object repositories).
- Chris Raymond is a member of the Landscape Values Institute. He and his colleagues have developed a tool for collecting and collating information on what the community values in an environment, which is being used to help make decisions on where to invest resources in environmental management. For more information on this, you can read their draft report (pdf 3.6MB) on this tool.
These new tools offer an exciting possibility for environmental managers to be much better informed about how to invest their resources in managing our environment and natural resources. Yet Australia is in danger of being a leading “primary producer” of environmental data (attribution to Alan Cooper, University of Adelaide), but with little or no value added to the data. As a country, we need to quickly adopt these new internet-based tools for distributing, displaying, analysing and collecting data. In particular, government agencies who are custodians of large environmental datasets need to release this information freely on the internet and allow environmental managers, academics, other agencies and entrepreneurs to add value.
Hi Paul,
You might be interested to know that http://nrmtoolbar.net uses Education.au’s DSM to aggregate search results.
One of the aims for that site is to try and make it easier for people to find things from a range of different sources without having to investigate each one separately
[...] OpenDSM release yesterday on this blog. Paul Darby saw enough possibilities in the technology to blog about it himself. That was fortunate, because it reminded me that we haven’t mentioned the NRMToolbar [...]
Nick @ Education.au » More OpenDSM pointers said this on February 20, 2008 at 10:51 pm |
Paul,
Good pickup on the openDSM technology – I did not think of the link to the NRM world until you pointed it out. Will listen to Peter’s podcast today and come back with any inspired ideas.
For those interested in the openDSM, we have set up a little community of interest at:
http://me.edu.au/c/opendsm
Swing by and take a look.
p.s. I see in a related comment by Nick Lothian that NRM Toolbar uses openDSM. So does the ‘advanced search’ at edna.edu.au (click on the ‘distributed’ tab for a slice of the magic – notice how the first page of search results display immediately, while openDSM continues to wait in the background for slower content sources).
The Department of Water, Land & Biodiversity Conservation (DWLBC) make surface water, groundwater and spatial data publicly available through the e-NRMIMS website (http://e-nrims.dwlbc.sa.gov.au). The aim of the website is to be a delivery portal for natural resource management information, and the range of information products available is continually being improved.
[...] for sharing information Following on from a previous blog on making use of Enviromental Technologies, a small group of interested people got together on 6th [...]
Tools for sharing information « LitFuse said this on March 18, 2008 at 5:12 am |
Hi Paul,
I could not agree more with your discussion. My company has been deploying wonderfull Web 2.0 tools to bring value to environmental data. There are so many companies flying blind when it comes to interpretation and processing of environmental information. Unfortunatelly the governmental agencies that regulate them are not in much better shape. You may drop to our website or blog at locustechnologies.wordpress.com
-Neno
[...] in a democracy is to link the public servants to the public. My particular beef is about making government data available freely online, both in raw form, and interpreted from the view of government. But there is so much more that [...]
What do the public servants think? « LitFuse said this on May 26, 2009 at 8:36 am |