A week in, and I’ve already run into problems at a conceptual stage of my application. I conceptualised the application I would like to build my assignment, and assessed the feasibility of its implementation and discovered many problems. I may even have to scrap the idea and find a new one. Read more about my idea below the break.

After some thought, I decided on the following concept for the assignment: a rural fire warning application for people living in potential bushfire zones in Australia, coupled with current social networking trends.

The concept itself raises several issues.

At first I searched through the Bureau of Meteorology(BOM) for any data that could be consumed for the app’s purposes. However, most of the BOM’s data only deals with weather forecasts; any inclement weather warnings are listed as textual press releases, not in any easily consumable data formats.

This then led me to look elsewhere, which eventually landed me at the department of Geoscience Australia, which provides maps similar to what I was aiming to accomplish with my application. These maps are constructed from data organised by the Sentinel national bushfire monitoring system, which pulls from the latest data generated by NASA’s satellites, namely the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). Unfortunately, these maps were self-contained; again, no data feeds from which I could pull from. MODIS itself was unhelpful; although I eventually did find some data, I still could not make sense out of all the raw data that was available (I’m no meteorologist!).

So I turned to the Country Fire Authority, to see if there were any information I could grab from them. As it turns out, they provide RSS feeds of the latest warnings for public consumption! This was great news; I could use the RSS feed and display them on my application.

As it turns out, it wouldn’t be that easy:

1. The RSS feeds do not provide any clear information, just street names. This means there will be a margin of error narrowing down exact locations to display on a map.
2. Since it wasn’t bushfire season, there was no sample data I could build off. I would have to contact them in order to get a sample.
3. Some feeds only give images; there would be no way of customizing my own maps from data.

Next came a even bigger problem: each state/territory in Australia has its own department for bushfire response (CFA in Victoria, RFS in New South Wales etc.), and each of these departments had their own feeds. This meant it would be nearly impossible to provide a consistent representation for all the data that was available from different states.

There are other resources I have yet to investigate, so I will continue to assess the feasibility of building this application. Stay tuned for Part 2!