Open New Zealand » NZ

Tweeting Tides

gnat — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:00:18 +0000

In a recent note to the mailing list, Stuart Lewis pointed to @AKLPortTides, @WGNPortTides, and @ONEPortTides where he is automatically Tweeting tide details for Auckland, Wellington, and Onehunga ports respectively using LINZ tide data. He has blogged what’s going on behind the scenes. Stuart was inspired by Simon Lyall’s @NZ_quake twitterbot that passes on the latest earthquakes from GeoNet.

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Open Government Barcamp

gnat — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:07:47 +0000

Don’t miss the Open Government Barcamp in Wellington on Saturday August 29, and the hackfest the day after. A “barcamp” is a chance to meet like-minded people, learn what’s going on, and kick off stuff that matters. Join the mailing list, add yourself to the wiki, and show up with your thinking hat on. It’s going to be great!

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MfE Releases Geodata under CC License

gnat — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:00:56 +0000

Kudos to the Ministry for the Environment–they’ve released the New Zealand Land Cover Database (LCDB) under a Creative Commons Attribution-SharealikeAttribution license. This is one of the first of many datasets we hope to see released from Government under reuse-friendly CC licenses. The State Services Commission is working on a paper on open government data, which hopefully will provide guidance on CC licenses to guide departments towards best practices and liberal terms.

Interesting points with the LCDB:

dataset is downloadable from Koordinates and [added 20090706, NJT] on physical media fro TerraLink International.
the home page for LCDB links to its uses, which helps MfE establish how useful the open data is and to whom.
MfE provide contact email address and documentation for the database. This documentation is static, and there is no forum or other community–an opportunity for the future.

Naturally, the Open Data Catalogue now has an entry for LCDB.

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