This blog post supplements the exercises distributed in the Google Fusion Tables workshop presented during Library Research Week. It is designed to make it easier to navigate to the various links given in those exercises.
In the workshop we use Google Fusion Tables to create a "heat map" of NSW highlighting crime hotspots. In order to accomplish this we will draw in and combine data from two sources.
The first is a comma-separated-values (CSV) file containing crime statistics for all Local Government Areas (LGAs) in NSW. The 152 LGAs in NSW are variously referred to as shires, councils, cities, etc. You can read all about them here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_government_areas_of_New_South_Wales
The crime statistics, meanwhile, can be obtained here:
The second data source is a keyhole mark-up language (KML) file that describes the boundaries of all the LGAs in NSW using geospatial coordinates. This dataset is available here:
http://www.tallyroom.com.au/maps
We have made some 'tweaks' to this dataset to make the workshop exercise run more smoothly. The modified dataset is available for download here:
You'll need a Google Account to complete this exercise. If you don't already have one, you can create one here:
