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On 12 February 2009, David Braue on ZDNet Australia published the story, “Vic Govt limited Google’s bushfire map”. The post documents Google’s trouble in gaining access to Victorian Government data about the movement of bushfires in Victoria.
According to the post, Google has been working with the Commonwealth Fire Authority, which manages fires on private lands, to overlay the Authority’s data onto Google Maps to produce a real-time map of the locations of the fires. The map also uses a colour scheme to convey the seriousness of the fires: green (safe), yellow (controlled), orange (contained) and red (going). Naturally, this map is immensely beneficial to those in Victoria and elsewhere who are attempting to track the bushfires.
However, Google has run into some problems gaining access to data to plot fires on public lands. This data is owned and controlled by the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment and permission is required from the government before the data can be used. For Google, this permission has not been forthcoming. The result is that Google has been unable to plot this data onto their map.
As noted in the ZDNet Australia post, this is not the first time Google has had trouble accessing and using Australian government data. They were denied permission from the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aging to overlay data from the National Public Toilet Map onto a Google Map.
This is an important issue and one that the community is clearly concerned about (see the comments posted to the ZDNet Australia story).