Making geographic information accessible

The develoment of GosfordGIS started in October 1999, when I came into contact with the Rural Fire Service and the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

They were working on the Bush Fire Risk Management Plan for the Gosford and Woy Woy areas (Gosford LGA).

They had used professional mapping software to prepare this plan, and the initial idea was for me to take this work further, as part of a research masters thesis in geography I am preparing at the University of Sydney.

I am a geographer and social anthropologist by training, but had spent the last seven years working in agriculture and forestry aid projects in the South Pacific.

During my work there I had often thought that desktop mapping applications - called GIS - could be useful in many situations, provided they are simple enough to use.

The aim of my research project at Sydney Uni was to see how this could be done.

GIS (Geographic Information Systems), by the way, are the combination of maps and related databases in a computer environment, together with a user interface.

It is possible to ‘point’ to a certain item on the map and see the information connected to it, but it is also possible to make a data query and use the result to change the map (for example: find all wetlands in Woy Woy and colour them dark green).

These GIS systems are quite complicated, and my interest soon turned to the question how the available information for our area could be made accessible to the average computer user.

My definition of the ‘average’ user is someone who has some background knowledge in MS Office, but no interest to learn any extra software skills just to work with maps, 3D models or air photos.

The aim was to create a program that could be used by such an ‘average’ user after about 15 min of practice, while still containing all the available information on boundaries, water courses, wetlands (etc. - you have seen the program) in the Gosford area.

It is interesting, by the way, that a modern computer "out of the box" is able to manipulate text, data, graphics, music, video, almost anything, but not maps and air photos except at the most basic level.

GosfordGIS tries to expand the limits in this area.

The program was written by me in VisualBasic, but also includes some ready-made building blocks that would be far too complicated to program otherwise.

Some of these, like data compression routines, are publicly available on the internet.

A lot of the specialised mapping functionality was kindly provided in demo form by a company called ESRI, which produces professional GIS software.

ESRI’s Sydney office also has general resource kits for schools, which are well worth exploring.

GosfordGIS should be useful for schools and community groups which want to learn more about the geography and ecology of our local environment, or wish to use the printouts for further project work.

It is a completely non-commercial product, to which many individuals and institutions have contributed. I wish to acknowledge these contributions, as without them the program could not have been written.

I am currently in the process of leaving the Peninsula, and will soon be in the Dominican Republic where both myself and my wife will again work in aid projects.

She (her name is Shoko Saito and she is from Japan) will work with the Ministry of Health, while I will attempt to use GIS in order to support natural resource planning at the local level.

Expect to see a relative of GosfordGIS, in Spanish, in the Caribbean soon.

We are looking forward to return to Woy Woy in two years time.

Wieland Kunzel, Woy Woy