All about Know Where You Live

Know Where You Live is the prototype of a data mashup that displays a range of Australian Government data based on your geographic location along with a Google satellite map and relevant photo from the Powerhouse Museum Collection, the State Records NSW or the State Library of New South Wales collection. The Initial prototype was created in under 24 hours as part of the inaugural Govhack event in Canberra in October, 2009.

To make it possible to build the prototype in the 24 hour window we restricted ourselves to NSW data as they had the most consistent availability and format of the data we wanted to use for the mashup (don't worry - we want to add national data when state and federal governments release it).

Why we made this

Mashup Australia and GovHack are about providing the government with examples of what can be done with their data and the advantages of releasing more accessible data, with this view we created a site that was easily accessible, engaging, friendly and obvious to politicians in its benefits.

Rather than the user actively choosing to seek something out or search to find a complex relationship within the data. We wanted a product/service that related to the general public, something that appealed to the browsing and comparing habits of users with a low barrier to entry.

A lot of statistics are already available on government websites however they're often in formats and structures that are confusing to average users. Information and data about one location is also frequently spread across multiple government departments, making it difficult to compare and in some cases even find relevant information.

We decided to focus on the end-user and take snap shots of high level data for the user to explore. By using this pattern of browsing, rather than active seeking, the user gains a sense of their Suburb and local government area. The goal is for the user's interest to be peeked and for them to find something interesting that they didn't know about where they lived. If you are able to build an audience of the general public they will start to expect that more data be available from the government.

There's a wide range of interesting data about neighbourhoods that's not immediately obvious, even if you live there: average household income, socio-demographic statistics, health and school information, transport information etc.

And one of the best ways to get the general public using this data is to answer one simple question "how does that relate to me?".

Who's behind it

Know Where You Live was built by Eric Auld (@ericdot), David Lewis (@dp_lewis) and Simon Wright (@diversionary).

How it's built

Know Where You Live is running on the CakePHP framework, using a MySQL database to store data. We used data from a variety of sources and used Excel to manipulate it into a common structure before adding it to the database.

The site also uses a few CSS3 tricks to make itself pretty such as text-shadow and rotate, and has the typeface 'Chunky' by The League of Moveable Type embedded using the font-face property.

If your browser doesn't support these shiny new toys, you should see the same data without all the bells and whistles.

The challenges we faced

The biggest hurdle we faced was the format of the data available.

A lot of the data available was in Excel documents which are structured to be human readable, with formatting and structures that help people understand and group the information. This same formatting makes it very difficult for computers to understand the data.

The second major problem we faced was the limited range of data available for each state and the lack of consistent national data formatting. While the ABS has some national data available, it's not easily accessed or parsed into usable database formats. And while some useful data is available for some states (such as crime data) it's not available nationally, making it difficult to create a truly national dataset to run the site.

Finding data to create the relationship between geographic locations and classifications such as postcodes and Local Government Areas also posed a problem. We ended up working with others at the GovHack event with Geographic Information Systems software to separate the geographic data into easily accessed spreadsheets.

Another consideration is that the granular postcode data from the ABS originated from the 2006 census. While this is still reasonably relevant today, it will only continue to become more out of date until the next census in 2013. Other data that is updated more frequently tends to be less granular and therefore not as useful for suburb by suburb comparisons.

Data we used