The NBN Atlas’ spatial portal, which was originally designed by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), currently offers tools and functionalities that can bring together biological records with environmental and contextual data for analysis. Recently the ALA released a new version of the spatial portal, offering more tools and functions. We now want to review the value and usefulness of the capabilities that all these tools and functions might offer to our data community.
Over the next few months we will be reaching out to explore and discuss these new capabilities so that we can develop a clear understanding of their value, such that any implementations we make meet a recognised need. During our discussions we will be seeking answers to questions such as:
- Which data analytical capabilities would be useful for your work if they were provided via the NBN Atlas?
- Why are they useful?
- What spatial data layers would you like to use in the NBN Atlas?
- What tasks would you use these layers for?
Our discussions will commence in November at the NBN Conference and specifically at the spatial portal knowledge exchange session. Later in the year, views will be sought via a short questionnaire, and this is likely to be followed by workshops early in the new year. Our aim is to develop a set of user stories to support the business case for providing tools and functionalities for data analysis.