The Scope
Few years ago Queensland was hit by a
series of severe nature disasters including drought, bush fire, floods and
typhoons- affecting thousands of people. Causing towns and cities, destroyed properties
and affecting many lives. At least 70 towns and over 200,000 people were
affected and estimated damage of 2.40 billion dollars (Wikipedia 2014). Those
incidents in past brought in about a lot of changes and also provided basis to
our idea of developing Homestigation. Homestigation is an interactive website
that is an essential tool in finding a good property investment that is secure
and natural calamity safe. So, the main concept behind our idea is to provide
people with a service that can be used to check whether a place is naturally
safe and secure with the help of the data that we will provide on the website
that can be analysed for the same purpose. Our website will consists of
relevant and dynamically clustered data representing it in the form of graphs,
maps and hotspots about natural disasters that have occurred in the past. The
main interface of the website displays three tabs that are maps, graphs and hot
spots. Each of these tabs will display data on natural disasters like floods,
cyclones, droughts, bushfire for suburbs in Queensland. The map will display
the suburbs of Queensland in different colours depending upon the magnitude of
the disasters that has hit the specific area, while the hotspot pin points the
different specific disasters, and the graph gives the details of the calamity
in the form processed data.
Inspiration & Research
Homestigation is website that is made
for users to investigate if a particular home is safe by using information on
Trove. Information from Trove would consist of murders, crimes and occurrence
of natural disasters around the area. We wanted to target the crimes and murder
of a particular area as well however we’ve decided to “discard” it to target
only the specific area of natural disasters in Queensland as the scope was too
big. Plans on bringing back the removed concepts will be looked into
implementing after the website’s initial implementations.
We wanted to target a smaller scope
than the whole of Australia and chose Queensland, having that said Queensland
had a long history of natural disasters. Due to the conditions in Queensland,
it is prone to a variety of natural disasters, such as, cyclones, floods, and
drought and bush fire. (Australia Government, 2014)
The main inspiration behind
Homestigation is a crime tool issues by the New South Wales Bureau of Crime
Statistics and Research which showed the crime rates of each suburbs in New
South Wales as a colour coded map. The crime tool allowed users to select
various types of offences as well as showing users the data of different time
frames. The users can choose to also receive the data as a table or a graph.
Similar to the New South Wales Crime
tool, inspiration was also drawn from another crime mapping tool by The Omega
Group for the United States region. We wanted to take upon a similar concept to
theirs where their crime mapping had the ability to click and show more as to
what happened in the area. (Crime Mapping 2014) We also took some inspiration
from Alan Travis’ Map of Crime data in Britain (The Guardian, 2010)
The Design Concept
Purpose
Homestigation is a website that
features data such as information, stats, graphs, pictures on natural
calamities that have occurred in the past in suburbs of Queensland. This
information will be portrait to the users in the form of maps, graphs and hotspots
in an interactive way that it can be further used to analyse threats that can
occur in the future based on what has already happened in the past. This
website can be used by target users to analyse the safety of suburbs based on
natural disasters in the past in Queensland for a better future.
Audience
Through Homestigation we want to
provide a useful service that people can use for beneficial purposes. The main
targeted audience for this website would be people who want to buy homes in new
localities, people renting houses and the owners who are interested in knowing
about their locality. Other potential users of Homestigation are; investors,
property brokers and insurance risk assessment companies that would like
analyse specific areas that have faced natural calamities in the past or are
prone to them in future.
Interactivity
Figure 1: Homestigation Homepage
Figure 2: Maps Tab
Figure 3: Graphs tab with Charts selected
The mock up in figure 1 shows the
Homestigation homepage. This page displays the main map of Queensland along
with hotspots pinpointing the areas that were affected with some kind of
natural disasters in the past. Then the there are some options on the left that
you can use to specifically search for natural calamities like floods,
droughts, cyclones etc. On the top as you can see there are different tabs that
can be used to explore some other features such as maps and graphs displaying
information and stats of the natural calamity happened. The Figure 2 displays
the maps that can be accessed using the tab present on the top. This feature
displays the Queensland map along with information such as what area was
affected by a certain calamity and to what extent. Figure 3 displays the graphs
and gives our user important stats about natural calamities that occurred.
Utilization of Trove Data
We plan on using Trove data by using
its API to gather data from their articles database, searching for particular
key words that will bring out data on natural disasters in Queensland. With
that than the data will be used to plot the points of natural disasters on the
map as well as populate the graphs and table of their occurrence.
Poster
Figure 4: Homestigation Poster
The Poster is created with Wix HTML
Editor. (Wix, 2014)
Bureau
of Crime Statistic and Research. 2013. NSW crime tool. [ONLINE] Available
at:http://crimetool.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/bocsar/.
[Accessed 19 August 14].
Anon.
2014. Queensland Floods. [ONLINE] Available at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%9311_Queensland_floods.
[Accessed 22 August 14].
Kathryn
Wells. 2014. Natural disasters in Australia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/natural-disasters. [Accessed 25 August 14].
The
Omega Group. 2014. Crime Mapping. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.crimemapping.com/default.aspx.
[Accessed 25 August 14].
Alan
Travis. 2010. What has happened to crime?. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.theguardian.com/uk/datablog/2010/apr/26/factfile-uk-crime-statistics#.
[Accessed 25 August 14].
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