POS Team Meeting

On Wednesday, 3 October, Andrew Dennison, Akeal Hayek and Aaron Low of Gaia Resources were joined by Nick Middleton and Gus MacAulay members of McCaughey Centre’s (University of Melbourne) AURIN team, and Bryan Boruff, School of Earth and Environment (University of Western Australia) to discuss the longevity of the POSitive Places web interface. With close links between ANDS and AURIN, the group came together to discuss the use of the AURIN portal  as a means to provide a home for the POS Tool’s data and advanced functionality after the initial 2 year hosting period came to an end.

The meeting began with an overview of the POSitive Places ANDS project followed by a demonstration of the AURIN system highlighting several current projects. The meeting then focused on technical issues concerning how code developed for the POS Tool might be written so that advanced analytic functions could be ported to the AURIN system.

At a conceptual level however, a variety of options were discussed to maintain the longevity of the POS Tool after the initial ANDS project was complete. These include:

• Exposing the POS data to the AURIN system. As AURIN in not necessarily a data provider of sorts, this would require serving the data to AURIN from the Centre for Built Environment and Health, University of Western Australia or an alternate source.
• Port code developed for advanced POS Tools to the AURIN System (if not already available).
• Promote the POS ‘data structure’ so that it is adopted around the country expanding the scope of the project to other cities in Australia.
• Procure further funding to maintain the POS Tool in its current state.
• Adopt a participatory GIS approach crowd sourcing POS data from around the nation to promote community buy-in.

Whilst several options exist, it was communicated by those attending the meeting that the POS Tool was a valuable resource for researchers, planners and the public, and maintaining an accessible web presence that could be expanded to the national level would be advantageous to users as well as the longevity of the project.      

Thanks to those attending the meeting for your valuable insights.