Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Mapping migrants in Australia

Where do migrants live? Australian Bureau of Statistics has just published an interesting article that tries to answer that same question. We can learn from the article that:

A migrant is a person who has reported their country of birth as a nation other than Australia. Migration is an important contributor to Australia’s growing population. Since 2006, net overseas migration to Australia has contributed more to Australian population growth each year than growth through natural increase.

In the 2011 Census, there were 5.3 million migrants in Australia, which means one in every four (26%) Australian residents was born overseas. Australia’s migrant population is relatively large when compared with other Western nations. Taken as a proportion of the population, Australia has a larger migrant population than does New Zealand (23%), Canada (21%), the United States of America (13%) and the United Kingdom (13%).

The largest contributor to Australia's migrant population continues to be people born in the United Kingdom (UK). In the 2011 Census, 1.1 million UK-born migrants lived in Australia - around one in every twenty Australian residents.

In comparison to people born in Australia, migrants show a tendency to settle in major urban areas of Australia. While 64% of Australian-born people lived in a major urban area of Australia in 2011, 85% of those born overseas lived in a major urban area.

Within urban areas, migrants in Australia tended to live in Australia's two largest cities, a trend seen in Australia since the late 1940s. In the 2011 Census, just under half of all migrants in Australia lived in either Sydney or Melbourne, with 1.4 million residents of Sydney and 1.2 million residents of Melbourne being born overseas. Perth had the third largest migrant population in Australia at 568,000 people.

For further information on how to access detailed statistics on migrants in Australia please send your enquiries to info@aus-emaps.com.

Related Posts:
Census 2011 Online Maps
Census 2011 Online Maps User Guide
Mapping Australian social diversity
Mapping social diversity in NSW


Monday, May 12, 2014

RoyMorgan’s Helix Personas Tool

Helix Personas is a consumer segmentation and data integration tool that combines psychographic and behavioural information to classify the Australian population into 56 Personas types and 7 Communities. This information aids in understanding future buying intentions and media consumption patterns of prospective customers and can be easily integrated with 3rd party datasets.

Helix Personas provides the ability to more efficiently plan and buy media against target audiences, optimise sales areas and develop highly relevant, tailored marketing and consumer communication strategies across all forms of media: digital, direct, broadcast, print and ambient. This simple case study illustrate the use of Helix Persona profiles during roll out of 7-Eleven stores in WA.



Roy Morgan Research has just announced the addition of a catchment area analysis feature. The application was built by Map Data Services.

Please contact aus-emaps.com at info@aus-emaps.com for advice on options for customer segmentation and sales area analysis tools - for any budget and any size of business. 

Related Posts:
Census 2011 Online Maps User Guide
Mapping Australian social diversity
How maps can improve sales
Reference Maps for Fusion Tables
Visualising Census data on maps


Demise of middle class mapped

The disappearance of the middle class is a common phenomenon in many developed countries. Below is a map that illustrates transformation of Chicago in the USA.



The grey squares, representing middle class, dominated the city’s neighbourhoods in 1970’s but mostly vanished by 2012. They were replaced by the upper middle class and wealthy, represented by the green colour, as they spread from downtown to the north side of the city, and the poor, represented by the orange and red colours.

The map is an effort of Daniel Kayhertz, a student at the University of Chicago but was created in collaboration with several other researchers. The data comes from the U.S. Census.

Related Posts:
Census 2011 online maps
Census 2011 Online Maps User Guide
Mapping Australian social diversity

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Geoscience Australia upgrades Sentinel Hotspots

Sentinel Hotspots monitoring system, operated by Geoscience Australia, has just been upgraded to allow for better and more informative presentation of satellite detected fires over the continent. The newest version not only shows the location of hotspots but also enables interrogation of individual point information presented on the map.


The updated version contains a greater variety of contextual information, such as Google imagery, Topo-250K base map, land cover overlay as well as several layers for Local Government Areas with data from NEXIS – The National Exposure Information System (for example, population estimates, residential building replacement value estimates, commercial buildings counts and replacement value estimates, and more).

Perhaps the biggest improvement is the ability to preview on the map historical data which can be filtered by date and location. The information can also be downloaded in a variety of formats for further analysis or reuse.

Related Posts:
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New attempt to build disaster management platform
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Google public alerts map

Friday, May 9, 2014

Fighting graffiti with a map app

The City of Melbourne has released a map of the city's best street art as a part of the 'Do Art Not Tags' campaign. The initiative aims to educate the city's youth about the differences between street art and graffiti vandalism.


The map is built on ArcGIS Story mapping platform. The content for the map has been collected using ArcGIS's Collector App which allows for photos of the street art to be captured by smartphone, uploaded to Flickr and instantly added to the map.


First spotted on: Google Maps Mania

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Melway street directory moves online

It is a sign of times - Australia's iconic printed street directory, the Melway, is now available online.


The first hardcopy edition of the Melway street directory of Melbourne was released in May 1966 – that is, 48 years ago! It is currently in its 41st edition and its 39th edition can now be viewed also online using Google Map's familiar mapping platform.

Melway Online retains the street directory's frame and grid information, it is therefore possible to use the same frame and grid numbers on both the new interactive map and the original paper editions of the map. It includes the Google’s search functionality, which means it is also possible to search for locations, businesses and places of interest.

Brisway maps are also available online and it appears that Sydway version is being prepared for launch but maps are not yet showing up.

First spotted on Google Maps Mania

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Australia recorded 579 earthquakes in 2013

Geoscience Australia has just published a media release about seismic activity on the continent in 2013. According to official records, Western Australia was the most seismically active state, experiencing 332 earthquakes, New South Wales recorded 94 events, South Australia 88 and Victoria 30. The small town of Ernabella (Pukatja) in South Australia has recorded the largest earthquake in the nation for two consecutive years, experiencing a 5.7 magnitude event in both 2012 and 2013.

GA explains that “Western Australia’s high level of seismic activity can be attributed to the occurrence of earthquake ‘swarms’ in its Wheatbelt region. Swarms are small earthquakes that occur multiple times per week or month in a confined geographic area with no associated foreshock or aftershock. While Australia seems to experience a high number of earthquakes per year, most of the earthquakes are under magnitude 4.0, which are considered small as they don’t usually cause damage.”

 “Australia’s earthquakes are caused by the Indo-Australian plate being pushed northeast about 7cm per year, colliding with the Eurasian, Philippine and Pacific plates. This movement causes the build-up of stress in the interior of the Australian plate, which is then released during earthquakes.”


Geoscience Australia monitors, analyses and reports on significant earthquakes to alert emergency managers in the Australian Government, State and Territory Governments and the public about earthquakes in Australia and overseas so that the appropriate level of emergency response and assistance can be dispatched. Geoscience Australia also operates the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre with the Bureau of Meteorology.

Related Posts:
New attempt to build disaster management platform
Disasters and maps
Google public alerts map
Australian bushfire alerts maps
Map of Victorian emergency alerts

NSW geospatial data strategy

The New South Wales government has just released its long awaited location intelligence strategy reinforcing its strong commitment to spatially enable key NSW economic, social and environmental datasets.

The government has recognised that at present, the benefits of location intelligence are not being fully realised across NSW, that location-based information cannot be easily accessed and analysed with reliability across NSW Government agencies, and that there is too much duplication of effort collecting similar data, too little reuse and too few linkages across key datasets. Those practices are seen as costly and inefficient and therefore have to change.


The NSW government is consistently undertaking initiatives to improve collection, management and use of its data. Just last November the NSW Government Open Data Policy was announced under which all data created and collected by agencies is declared "open by default". And earlier this year Land and Property Information launched a new initiative called "NSW Globe" that lets users explore NSW government geospatial datasets on Google Earth.

Related Posts:
Google making inroads with Enterprise GIS
South Australia opens its data
East coast unanimously frees data
Free data a GFC casualty
Governments intensify free data efforts
Data overload makes SDI obsolete
What’s the benefit of gov data warehouses?