Team Name

Expose: Show us your data

Team Members

Project Description

Group of data munching friends who have a shared love of solving problems using data. Let us expose it and make it useful. Show us your data!

Data Story

GovHack2018Expose

Team memebers: Etienne Oosthuyesen, Jean-Noel Seneque, Jake Deed, Andrew Exley and Cameron Wells

Source Code url: https://github.com/ExposeShowUsYourData/GovHack2018Expose

Video url:

Homepage url: https://github.com/ExposeShowUsYourData/GovHack2018Expose

Local Event Location:

Adelaide
** Challenges: **
- Local - Improving Response - Best entry that assists CFS planning for and responding to incidents
- Local - Emergency Planning and Response - How can we better plan and respond to emergencies?
- National - Bounty: Mix and Mashup - How can we combine the uncombinable?
- National - Bounty: Decision Support - How can we make it easy to use weather and ocean data to our advantage? (e.g. when should you lay concrete, or go out yachtting or picnicking?)
- National - Working Together - How can open government data to improve responsers' situational understanding and ability to plan their response, and share their information between agencies? How can sharing information between agencies be improved by different information presentation, allowing more informed decisions during domestic emergencies or national security events?

Data Collection and Identification:

As a team we worked together to identify all the open licensed data sets, and Data Services we could freely use and re-purpose to meet the above challenges. Immediately we interpreted the challenges as needing mapping data sets; location based, as well as other real time data feeds. There's the data needed for preparation for those ready to confront whatever incident or emergency is occurring, there's the data needed to collect information about the incident, as well as peripheral data such as weather, rainfall\wind direction that is currently occurring. There's also the data to assist the services to reach the incident efficiently and safely, as well as those near the incidents to move away from danger as quickly and safely as possible. Once the relevant services are within proximiatey of the incident or emergency, they need continuous feeds of data to locate those injured or in danger, knowing where the exact front of the fire or emergency is, what risks are a factor, but also relying on constant communication to other emergency services, planes, applicances, volunteers and control centres. Basically, we wanted to find any data sets that may have been useful for any of these purposes.

Using the data, merging together and making available for users and contributors

With complex and different types of data sets, a necessary step is to land this data onto a shared platform, either using a traditional relation database platform, or more modern data stores like cosmos db which can handle semi structured data, to even something less complicated such as BLOB storage. Regardless of the platform, data can then be fed into a number of services using a real time messaging, or streaming service to push data out using a broker which can then be subscribed to by which ever agencies need it. The same source of data can be used by a number of agencies at the exact same time, seeing the same data, but potentially in a different format or application. i.e. A member of a CFS applicance may only want to know details of members of the same applicance, where as their regional chief, needs to know data about several appliances, and a control centre may need to know everything but in summary. All same data, all being pushed out at once, and can be used in different ways by different subscribers. Can also be used by Apps or reporting tools, but being stored in a database gains access to more complex processes like machine learning over historical data. The app can also play the role of data contributor too, allowing users to enhance the data further by inputting more accurate and real time substance such as if a fire or threat has moved, so that everyone can immediately subscribe and be shared the latest information.

Going further than that!

There is plethora of data that 'could' be collected to further enhance the challenge to plan and respond to emergencies even better. Having each vehicle, appliance, plane or helicopter to name a few, tracked by a device to publish to all involved where a vehicle is located at at any point in time, their fuel load and/or their water load (if water bomber or fire appliance). This could extend to individuals on the ground tracking where each servicemen is located, for a variety of benefits from a rescuing point of view, but proximity to the closest threat or person in need of rescue. More complicated devices could be used to locate people in distress either using meshing technology to locate a phone signal, or provide them with beacons so they can be located, with the beacons also sending data to the platform which can be used throughout the solution. Therefore, each entity within the 'environment of concern' can be located and tracked, therefore more complex algorithms can be used in combination of this data to find the best possible method of extracting those from danger, whilst focusing on retarding the threat. If a threat is a person or people, this too can be identified using facial recognition, and tracked and pin pointed using a variety of Artificial Intelligence API's.