Abstract

Delivering coastal data: the New South Wales Coastal Information System
Track: Mapping
Authors: Leander Wiseman, Stephen Lead

The NSW Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH) maintains around 30 years' worth of Government data, documents and paper maps for the NSW coastline. This information was previously inaccessible and undiscoverable. OEH devised the ambitious goal of liberating the information in these documents, and making it freely available to both the organization and the general public.

A key aim was to deliver the data in an intuitive web-mapping interface which blurs the boundaries between spatial and aspatial data, and which was useable by non-GIS users.

OEH scanned historic documents, then used semantic analysis to geo-tag placenames found within them, allowing their discovery via ArcGIS Server 10.1. This novel approach allowed hundreds of documents to be spatially-enabled automatically, and displayed alongside traditional ArcGIS datasets and external spatial services.

The Coastal Explorer project helps to maintain collective coastal knowledge, and improves coastal information discoverability.