tianjara.net | Andrew Harvey's Blog

The impacts of the Geoscience Australia switch to Creative Commons licensing is starting to take more shape. With much better quality licensing statements and notices appearing with new works they publish.

The licensing of the AGRI has allowed members of the public to on their own autonomy make and release derived works such as agri.openstreetmap.org, or the OSM edits which use it. GA must have problems hosting the huge amount of data themselves (because you can only obtain it via DVD), no problem the CC licensing has allowed the public to do a better job with hosting it online.

I've done a similar thing for the The National Dynamic Land Cover Dataset.

In other news I've just learnt about the Unlocking the Landsat Archive project. This is interesting because "Within this project, Geoscience Australia will transfer it’s archive of Landsat data to the NCI and make it freely available under a creative commons licence."

Aiming to be completed by June 2013, lets hope they make both the raw data and standard derived products available. All under CC-BY or CC0, and all through a documented API which developers can use to access the data.

Finally I've found http://earthengine.google.org/. I'm really impressed. It is really easy to use, you just select the satellite and your date and up on your web map you get the collected imagery overlaid.

All this raster work has rekindled my interest in remote sensing.

Looking at the ASGS 2011 mesh blocks geographically, most of the landmass of Australia is classified as Agriculture (I am aware that the mesh block category which is used here isn't a definitive land use, purely an indicator of the main planned land use of the mesh block...). Only a few coastal areas, the hills between Vic and NSW at the South East (I should really know the proper name... better have the name added to (F)OSM!) and West Tasmania are Parklands.

Using some scripts I wrote, I present a graph of the mesh block total area by category.