In December 2009 the Victorian Government released a “proof of concept” mashup with demographic and government services data known as VisualPlace.
VisualPlace is a six month Proof of Concept testing innovative ways of capturing, exploring and visualising government information and services through maps. VisualPlace brings together information from a wide variety of sources from service locations to demographic data to allow you to create custom maps.
VisualPlace uses a Silverlight powered application known as VisualFusion (developed by IDV Solutions) and can map data from 2006 National Census, Government Service locations and even Tram and Train station and lines. For example here is a mashup of “People who travelled to work by Public Transport as a proportion of All Employed People” (shaded areas where yellow are high percentages and blue are low percentage) against “Train Stations” (green markers):
The only thing that annoys me is that if the Governement Services related data is available why not make it easily accessible to the public via an API or data.government.gov.au. If you would like to gain access to Demographic (Census) data visit the Australian Bureau of Statistics website.
Be sure to check it out quick as it will be taken down by July 2010.
Enjoy.