Interactive mapping

A friend recently sent me this as an example of interactive mapping...

Basically readers of stuff.co.nz have been sending in their images of the Rena oil spill and the locations from where the pictures were taken, and then stuff has used googles maps to locate the pictures on a map...so simple yet very effective. Check it out Rena interactive map.

I like this idea, that you can look at the big picture, yet as a user, interact with the map to see a close up aspect and feel like "you're there, in the moment at the location.

To incorporate this idea into my project, I'm going to use a similar "big picture aspect" to show the locations of various three-water infrastructure components, then use the software to zoom into various locations, and give the viewer an actual view of the infrastructure. It will probably be the case that the viewer will recognise the infrastrutcure, having driven or walked past it, and never realised it had anything to do with their water use.

I had a similar moment last week. I emailed the Council infrastructure people about the locations of outfall pipes. The helpful stormwater people sent me a link, explaining that there are literally THOUSANDS of these outfall pipes throughout Auckland...I only thought there were a few main ones!

So I made a quick snapshot of an area between Grey Lynn and Avondale, showing the patterns of the various infrastructure underneath us.

The green lines indicate the stormwater pipes, the red are the wastewater, and the blue are the freshwater pipes. I find the layout of the them interesting. The stormwater follows a more fluid pattern, following the waterways in the city. The blue is more aligned to the street networks (obviously to service the households), and the wastewater doesn't seem to have a set pattern, it cuts across properties and diverts away from main transport routes. I wonder what the reason is for that.

If you want to check it out for yourself, here's the link Auckland Council GIS site