Sunday, September 16, 2007

Australia readies itself for a Google Maps election


location based services


Friday, September 14, 2007 at 10:01 PM



It might not be widely known to our friends in the northern hemisphere, but a federal election is due to take place in Australia before the end of the year. Nothing captures the public's attention or stirs emotion quite like an election, however, many of our citizens do not have easy access to electorate information. A recent launch in Sydney of a Google Australian election website helps to remedy this by providing Australian voters with an intimate look at the parties, candidates and election issues.



The main product for this initiative is an electorate Mapplet, which identifies which parties hold what seats, who the sitting member is and what margin they currently enjoy. It has a number of interactive features that allow people to analyze the political landscape in depth. And once the election is called, we intend to add polling booth locations and even more candidate information.

It is worth noting that this Mapplet was built with publicly accessible data using Google Pages for hosting and is something any developer could have constructed — all of the tools we used are available to the public. For more information, please view the product demo below.

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