Commenting on a comment on my slightly disappointed take on a couple of new spatial datasets yesterday, our regular reader Glenn Hyman, another CGIAR CGI uber-geek, muses thus:
If I was a young GIS geek, I think I would concentrate on how to create online applications for the non-expert.
Do you mean, Glenn, the kind of “online application for the non-expert” which the Atlas of Living Australia aspires, with considerable success, to be? Which coincidentally is being so actively discussed on Twitter just now. ((Eucarpia participants, please note!)) And which I need to road test again very soon, as there have been significant changes since the last time I took it around the block.
@AgroBioDiverse Profile: https://t.co/oCIvoRaEnd The presentations will probably be on line shortly.
— Jim Croft (@jim_croft) June 12, 2013
One of the best online atlas, period. Please find the time to report on your trials: I’m short on real world examples to test it with.
I can’t find the button that says “Play with me”.
It’s right HERE.
Perhaps Luigi knows :) Looking at the Mapping & Analysis tool, I feel the Atlas is overstepping its raison d’être: it should a offer a collection of beautiful, original maps, or engage the crowd into producing citizen maps and feature them there. Its online mapper and analyst still is quite good, though. But damn, maybe it’s just me: I don’t like doing this type of work inside a browser.
I am at the meeting on the Atlas in Canberra right now. This atlas and the analysis tools with 400+ layers one can put on the landscape are simply amazing. The citizen science component is also mature and yes! This should be the model if one ever wanted to put together a monitoring system for worldwide agriculture! (A system we urgently need!)