On Wednesday 25 November, the Department of Transport Victoria launched VISTA 07 Online in a launch event in Melbourne. VISTA 07 (Victorian Integrated Survey of Travel Activity 2007) utilizes the SuperVIEW Web 2.0 application from Space-Time Research to make travel information freely available to the community. The data was collected in 2007 in the largest survey ever undertaken on Victorian travel and activity.
Here are three interesting things on VISTA 07 from the Transport, Government 2.0 and Technology perspectives:
- Transport — By making VISTA 07 available to the public online and allowing people to query and visualize the information for themselves (this is not about pdf reports…), the Department of Transport is providing a shared reference point for discussions with the community about transport issues. VISTA 07 provides information on the complex travel interactions occurring within Victorian communities, and SuperVIEW makes it easy to understand and analyse this information. For the Department of Transport, this means that discussion and debate on Melbourne and Victoria’s transport future is better informed.
- Government 2.0 — Michael Hopkins, Executive Director at the Department of Transport, launched VISTA 07 by welcoming the availability of the data to the public. Naturally, the data will be very valuable to both “traditional” users of transport statistics within the department (such as for tracking progress against 20% by 2020 and other initiatives) and to Transport planners (from Engineering consultancies and academia). But importantly, because VISTA 07 is an online tool it enables a third group of users to access the data — the community. People in the community now have access to the same information as the transport planners and consultants so that they can also make informed decisions and have informed discussions.
- Technology — VISTA 07 uses the Space-Time Research's Hybrid Cloud solution. This means that enormous processing potential is available to deal with usage peaks for the online tool without the need for the department to pay for massive servers/virtual servers. Hardware sizing problems go away. SuperVIEW provides the architecture and privacy mechanisms to make this happen.
About SuperVIEW from Space- Time Research
SuperVIEW™ is a powerful product provisioning rich, interactive Gov 2.0 / Web 2.0 data exploration sites for either public-facing or intranet deployments. It supports interactive map-based data visualisations using ESRI ArcGIS 9.3 Server and Javascript technologies.
Through REST interfaces, SuperVIEW utilizes SuperSTAR's powerful data analytics engine to quickly generate ad hoc multi-dimensional tables for its visualisations from potentially large and complex underlying datasets.
Find out more about the underlying technology, SuperVIEW.
About the VISTA 07 Data
VISTA 07 is a survey of personal travel by residents of Melbourne, Geelong and the regional centres of Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton and Latrobe. The collected travel data from surveyed household members, from a walk around the block to a trip interstate, will be used to enhance the Victorian Government's understanding of the complex travel interactions occurring in Victorian communities.
Learn more about the VISTA 07 data or try the online analysis tool VISTA 07.