IMIA Asia Pacific Conference: Part 2b

Cloud

New South Wales Trade & Investment - the agency who advice geological and mining matters to government, corporations and mining sectors - want to develop a tool for the public to know the mining activity of the state. They approached Spatial Vision, one of the leading GIS companies in Melbourne to develop a Cloud Based application called Common Ground to convey mining information. Previously, the information of mining was largely confined to industry professionals market. Common Ground is making the mining information widely accessible and built on authoritative datasets. It would be map based using CartoDB. Below here is workflow process (the product is not complete yet)

Full Credits: Hiroki Gota (Spatial Vision) 2014

GIS in Public Transportation

Translink Queensland Works

 Disclaimer: This part of the article remains under construction                                   

Next presentation was focusing on how GIS assist state subsidized public transportation for their students. The presenter has his own consultancy firm, Jan Simpson Consulting. He was contracted some time ago to work with Translink Queensland. This state organization manages all public transport systems (i.e. buses, trains, ferries) for the whole state of Queensland. One of the key programs organized by Translink is Student Travel Assistance Scheme (STAS). 

STAS provides subsidized transport to school children. It costs the state approximately $150-160 million annually to fund this program. It serves 2321 state schools or 500 000 students across the state. In order to qualify for STAS program, a student must:

Primary school : He or she must be more than or equal to 3.2km from the nearest state school to his or her residence

Secondary school : He  or she must be more than or equal to 4.8 km from the nearest state school to his or her residence

Hence, his project would revolve around GIS (as it is geographical problem) and he needs to develop a system for a non-technical audience to operate it in a fast manner. IT involved a big collaboration work between the government, public and developers

One of the main criteria for STAS eligibility is the shortest distance. For this instance, shortest distance refers the shortest trafficable route from student residence to the school access point. Restrictions were added into the GIS program where private roads (e.g. gated communities), four wheel drive tracks, non- constructed roads, one way roads, ferries and busways were excluded in the calculations. The system will calculate nearest school to student residence and takes into account of all restrictions incorporated in GIS. The results are stored in the GIS and DBMS. The challenge was to compute shortest distance between 2.4 million address points and schools. This resulted 20 million calculations and if were to be done continuously, it would have consumed 22 days of work (non-stop)

Over time, he devised three level classifications for STAS program: Are you in the STAS area (based on distance criterion), are you out of STAS area or in the marginal area? This helps the STAS staff to deduce whether potential students are eligible for the program quickly.

He integrated his system with Global GBM for Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) and developed in tandem with GBM a web-based interface for the STAS staff.