Move over Sheboygan! There's a new MapGuide sample dataset in town!

For the longest time, the Sheboygan dataset has been our reference dataset for demonstrating the data publishing capabilities of MapGuide as well as being the focal point for all our sample code demonstrating the use of the MapGuide API.

Unfortunately, the actual spatial data in the Sheboygan dataset does not lend itself for MapGuide to demonstrate its capabilities to its fullest. Short of the Parcels layer, everything else in the dataset is just "dumb" spatial data, lacking any real attributes of substance that we could use to demonstrate features of MapGuide with.

MapGuide deserves a more comprehensive and intelligent sample dataset to show off its features and capabilities, and I think I found it.

Say hello to my home city of Melbourne

This MapGuide dataset was made possible by the various bits of open spatial data made available under City of Melbourne's open data platform. I discovered this site the night before GovHack 2014 as City of Melbourne was one of the "data custodians" for the GovHack event. Though I didn't use any of their data over the hackathon weekend, I did make a mental note about the rich and varied volume of data that they had available and that there might be enough stuff in there to make a much more compelling sample dataset for MapGuide than what we currently have with Sheboygan.

So a few weeks after GovHack, I paid another visit to that site to check out their data offerings in more detail and see what kind of dataset we can make in MapGuide with their available datasets. The above screenshot is the current work in progress. The MapGuide dataset was assembled together very quickly with the help of MapGuide Maestro. I guess that's a testament to the many years of development work put into Maestro to make it the most efficient authoring tool for MapGuide (not trying to toot my own horn here honest :)).

Most of the spatial data was in SHP format making loading into MapGuide a dead simple affair. Some of the spatial data was in CSV (huh?), so these were converted to SQLite with the help of OGR and its awesome virtual format feature. One particular dataset they had which sparked my initial interest in building this MapGuide dataset was the Building Footprints, which contains actual height attributes!

This means demonstrating MapGuide's KML support is much more exciting now because we can actually tap into the elevation and extrustion support to give actual height to our KML buildings exported from MapGuide.

As mentioned before, this MapGuide dataset is a work-in-progress which you can check out on my GitHub. If you want the actual package, you can get it from the releases page. If you are interesting in seeing a more comprehensive sample dataset for MapGuide, I encourage you to contribute to this repo. If you are so inclined, I'd also encourage you to have a look at the City of Melbourne data portal and see what other interesting datasets we could integrate.

It would be nice to also have a nice set of sample code that works against this dataset as well. Aside from porting the developer's guide samples across to work against this dataset, if you have any interesting ideas we could explore with this dataset, I'm all ears.

None of this would be possible if the City of Melbourne didn't open up their various datasets. So full kudos to them for not only opening up these datasets, but also for licensing their data under Creative Commons and not some "open" license that's entangled under various legal spiderwebs.

#opendata ftw!