The terms of the new Landsat 8 satellite agreement between the governments of the United States and Australia acknowledge that Geoscience Australia (GA), like its senior partner the US Geological Survey, is committed to making more spatial data more readily…
ccAustralia research helped during flood crisis
During the recent devastating flood crisis which affected much of Queensland, geospatial data, specifically digital elevation models or DEMs, were imperative to the creation of accurate flood models and for overcoming many operational challenges.
On 11 February 2011, the Australian Financial Review published an article entitled ‘Floods stress mapping needs’ which emphasises the significance of national elevation data available via Geoscience Australia‘s DEM web portal. The data, which was released on 15 December 2010, consolidates geospatial data from dozens of different agencies. Importantly, all of that data is released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.
Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘Flooding in Australia‘ by NASA Goddard Space Centre, CC BY 2.0 Generic.
Happy 7th birthday CC!
And we reach another milestone.
It’s been a big year this year, with CC really hitting the mainstream.
We’ve had big adopters internationally – Obama, Wikipedia, Yoko Ono, Al Jazeera – and locally – the ABC, Mash Up Australia, Powerhouse Museum, Geoscience Australia (and many more).
More on Government Data – Geoscience Australia goes CC
We know we’ve been publishing a lot about licensing of government documents and data of late, but there really has been so much happening that we just can’t resist. This week’s story is one we’ve actually been meaning to post about for a while.
As of late November Geoscience Australia has officially adopted Creative Commons Attribution as the default licence for its website. This means more than 18 877 products available through the website, including 3690 datasets, are now free to be reused, repurposed and remixed, including for commercial purposes – as long as you attribute Geoscience Australia as the original source, of course.
Credits—Photo: ‘Shattuck_23096-1, Uluru, NT‘ by SouthernAnts, CC BY 2.0 Generic.