Making the invisible visible : The impact of federating groundwater data in Victoria, Australia
- Authors: Dahlhaus, Peter , Murphy, Angela , MacLeod, Andrew , Thompson, Helen , McKenna, Kirsten , Ollerenshaw, Alison
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Hydroinformatics Vol. 18, no. 2 (2016), p. 238-255
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- Description: The Visualising Victoria's Groundwater (VVG) web portal federates groundwater data for the State of Victoria, Australia, thus making legacy data, government datasets, research data and community sourced data and observations visible to the public. The portal is innovative because it was developed outside of the government and offers real-time accessto remote authoritative databases by integrating the interoperable web services they each provide. It includes tools for data querying and 3D visualisations that were designed to meet end-user needs and educate the broader community about a normally invisible resource. The social impact of the web portal was measured using multidisciplinary research that employed survey instruments, expert reference groups, and internet analytics to explore the extent to which the web portal has supported decision making by governments, industry, researchers and the community. The research found that single access, multiple data set web portals enhance capacity by providing timely, informed and accurate responses to answer queries and increase productivity by saving time. The provision of multiple datasets from disparate sources within a single portal has changed practices in the Victorian groundwater industry. © 2016 The Authors.
Historic urban landscapes and visualising Ballarat : Citizen participation for sustainable urban planning and design
- Authors: Murphy, Angela , Dahlhaus, Peter , Thompson, Helen
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings , Conference paper
- Relation: 3rd Annual Conference of Research@Locate, R@Loc 2016; Melbourne, Australia; 12th-14th April 2016; published in CEUR Workshop Proceedings
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- Description: Technological innovation has provided enhanced capacity for knowledge building, for connection and for improved infrastructure planning in the development of the modern city. In parallel to the building of technology supported urban planning and design capacity, a debate has emerged around the need to maximise citizen participation in urban planning. The role of identity, culture and social context has been assessed as being as integral to sustainability in urban planning as is infrastructure management. In 2011 UNESCO, through the mechanism of the recommendation for Historic Urban Landscapes (HUL), created an imperative for the overt recognition of the role of culture, place and identity in sustainable urban planning. The City of Ballarat, Victoria, was the first of a series of international cities to pilot HUL and commit to inclusive citizen based collaboration in urban planning. Through online technology, a platform for partnership building was established. Developed and supported through the Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation at Federation University Australia, the HUL and Visualising Ballarat portals track the diversity of urban landscapes-from built environment to geomorphology to cultural identity-and facilitate their inclusion in planning and resource allocation. Crowdsourcing was promoted as pivotal in this process, while spatial innovation provided a means through which to bring to life the notion of distinctiveness, identity and place. Through mapping intangibles across complex and diverse groups within community, the potential for improving the quality and management of the planning process was found to be enhanced. Local Area Planning provided a mechanism for a conceptual alignment of past and present and the voice of community has gained a stronger (and more disruptive) voice in determining what communities' value within their lived environment. This shift was assessed as playing an important, and increasingly recognised, role in sustainable urban planning and design.
- Description: CEUR Workshop Proceedings