Media and mainstream embrace web mapping technology

The current bushfire disaster in Victoria hasve highlighted the emergence of web mapping as a mainstream technology with not only government agencies using it, but also the media and everyday people to communicate.

Online newspapers like the Herald Sun, The Age and The Australian have been ditching the old interactive Flash to track the emergency, featuring maps for to illustrate the fire effected areas, property damage and deaths to provide real-time updates. 

The use of these Web 2.0 technologies also shows the general public's growing familiarity with the interfaces of web maps which are becoming more and more intuitive and offer a wide range of different views including map, street level, photo, satellite or landscape and even user generated maps. 

Web mapping technology also features in the MECC Portal (Municipal Emergency Coordination Centre), a Web 2.0 software package which handles emergency coordination.  The major difference is that an additional level of integration with local government geographical information systems (GIS) provides a greater wealth of information than just Google Maps alone. 

Although council GIS often features greater detail, including the locations of local facilites and infrastructure in sophisticated overlays that user maps don't provide, they also have a very specialised interface which is nearly impossible for a layman to pick up ans use.  So providing end users with a simpler interface is one of the keys to making the application usable for the wider public and something that we've worked hard on MECC Portal to address.  Another issue is allowing users to not only access these maps remotely, but interact with them, including submitting new data, without compromising council IT systems, another issue which MECC Portal successfully addresses.

One day, we'd hope to see the media and general public being able to access real-time information directly from a council MECC.