Viewing Brisbane (AUS) flood imagery in Smallworld Applications

If you have been reading world news recently, you will have seen much reported about flooding in and around Brisbane, Australia. The disaster has been devastating to the people in its path and I wish them well as they try to piece their lives together in the aftermath.

I realized that there might be value in taking recent flood imagery and integrating it as a layer in various Smallworld telecom and utility applications. With this data a technician could determine which hubs or switch gear might be under water. The key to this, though, is to have near realtime flood imagery. Enter NearMap.com. They have flood imagery as of January 13 for Brisbane. You can view all their activity announcements at http://twitter.com/NearMap.

I have created a silent video of a proof-of-concept of integrating Smallworld with NearMap's Brisbane flood imagery. At the end of the video there is also a section on creating Smallworld trails from OpenStreetMap data. Remember that this is all data accessed over the web with no need to host any data on your servers.

The integration is done with Web Maps Connector which is a product offered by my employer iFactor Consulting.