On the afternoon of Wednesday 30 May 2012, the ANDS POSitive Places team held their first stakeholder workshop to identify specific users and functions necessary for a POS Tool. Over 25 people from local government, state planning agencies including the Department of Sport and Recreation, the Department of Planning and the Department of Health, and urban design and health researchers attended the workshop.
Professor Fiona Bull (project manager) provided an overview of the Centre for Built Environment and Health (CBEH), University of Western Australia and the ANDS POSitive Places project. Assistant Professor Bryan Boruff (technical manager) then provided a detailed description of ANDS and an overview of the POS Tool. Ms. Paula Hooper described, in detail, the underlying data sets which will be integrated in the POS Tool, followed by Mr. Piers Higgs (Director of Gaia Resources) with a technical description of the POS Tool itself.
Themes identified during the breakout sessions:
- A need to understand the roles of both non-green open space and green open space.
- Visualization is an important component – park locations should be shown on a map and/or in 3D.
- Those with GIS capabilities would like access to the data WMS or WFS.
- The ability to use POS data in conjunction with other types of data such as health and social planning information would be useful.
- Within the densification debate understanding the distribution of open spaces is definitely needed.
- The POS Tool needs to appeal to a broad audience – but does meet this potential.
- The simple functions of the POS Tool will work well – some of the more advanced functions do not necessarily appeal to advanced GIS users as they are more interested in access to the data to be used as the see fit.
- The use of the POS Tool for regional analysis is its strong suit as a comprehensive uniform POS data set does note exist for the region.
- The notion of the POS Tool does not fall short of many users needs.
- Adding in a user’s own population projects (as opposed to just those by the census) would be useful.
- Proper metadata is a must.
- Developers would also be interested in the tool – but may use the tool for other purposes
- Use of the data within Landgate’s Shared Land Information Platform (SLIP) would be beneficial.
- Need to address the issue of data updates.
- Ability to add other types of information to examine in conjunction with the POS data would be useful (i.e. economics information).
- There is potential for updates to the POS GIS layer through Landgate’s location information strategy.
- Attractiveness/amenity scores for each park would be useful.
And finally:
- The data itself is exciting; people will find uses for it!
