The Evolving Newsroom

I was just having a little play with the maps and datasets on http://koordinates.com – the brainchild of New Zealanders Ed Corkery and Rob Coup – and decided to see what ‘Hamilton 0.5 contours 2008′ would look like embedded:

Hamilton 0.5m Contours 2008 on Koordinates

I love it that you have the option of viewing terrain, satellite images, map or a combination of satellite image and map. And you can zoom in and move around in the map right here on the page. How cool is that?

I’ve been a bit slow to find this site but think it’s well worth further exploration – it could prove very useful illustrating stories online.

Some of the data and maps are available for free. Other sets incur a charge. You can build a picture of a particular area or concept by combining a map with particular data – health board boundaries, say, or school catchment areas – so long as that data is available.

This map shows DOC walking tracks:

DOC Tracks (May 2009) on Koordinates

This site will become ever more useful as it adds more datasets – another case for making more non-personal government data freely available.

The background to http://koordinates.com is this:

Ed and Rob have been studying and working in the geology, GIS and online mapping industries for a combined 13 years.

During that time, they experienced first-hand the frustrations felt by all professional people for the time-consuming process of finding and using digital geographic data. They envisaged a simpler way of bringing geodata to professionals around the world.

Ed and Rob put their heads together and spent most of 2007 thinking, researching and experimenting with a number of concepts. Working with industry partners, they finally created Koordinates.com – ‘the one place for geodata’. It was launched into Beta testing in November 2007.

Check it out.