Silverstripe Builds Geospatial Open Data Solution

MEDIA RELEASE
23 August 2011
For immediate release

Silverstripe Builds Geospatial Open Data Solution

SilverStripe is one of the first web companies to build an application which follows New Zealand’s government open data standards.

Last week, New Zealand’s Finance Minister and Internal Affairs Minister released a Declaration on open and transparent government and new Data Information Management Principles. Via open data, the government wants to publish more high value public data to make it easily accessible to the public.

A leading example is the New Zealand Geospatial Office (NZGO), a controlling body within Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). Together with SilverStripe Ltd., a Wellington based web development company, they have recently launched geodata.govt.nz. This website will be the main online presence to discover New Zealand geospatial data and will complement the existing database of data.govt.nz.

This application enables researchers, for example, to access fundamental climate and environmental information. Making this information publicly discoverable in a reusable way will enable researchers to bring datasets together and draw new conclusions.

SilverStripe developed the application to provide storage and web-service capabilities, supporting Open-Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. The website user can now search for raw data, reports and data sets and stream them into other applications via the OGC web-services. The database can also collect metadata from any distributed catalogue and anyone can add their data via the catalogue. The next step in this project will be to visualise the data in a map application.

Other SilverStripe projects which follow open data standards include the ‘Ocean Survey 20/20’ (OS20/20), created with the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), and the ‘Marine Biosecurity Porthole’, a website commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) and NIWA. OS20/20 maps data about species, marine fauna and deep water imagery. The portal visualises marine pests that have been recorded in certain areas around New Zealand ports over the last 10 years, threatening the New Zealand marine environment.

ENDS

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