Australian open data in your scene: cadastre, planning, hazards and live feeds

A scan shows what's on site. It doesn't show where the boundary runs, what the land is zoned, or whether a fire is burning two valleys over. That information usually sits on a government portal, in a format that takes an afternoon to get into the same coordinate system as your capture.

MapShare has a catalogue of public datasets built in, so you can put that context next to your scan without leaving the scene.

What's in the catalogue

The catalogue holds more than 1,600 datasets, from publishers including:

• Councils: Brisbane, Gold Coast, Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart and Perth
• States and territories: Queensland, NSW Spatial Services, Victoria, Landgate, Land Tasmania, South Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory
• Federal agencies: Geoscience Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Bureau of Meteorology, ABARES and Digital Earth Australia

The datasets are sorted into themes: cadastre, planning, boundaries, elevation, imagery, environment, hazards, transport, infrastructure, basemaps and 3D.

Some are live feeds that keep updating while you look at them, such as bushfire incidents and warnings, satellite fire detections, earthquakes and City of Melbourne sensors.

Adding a layer

1. Open your project and choose Add data, then Open and live data.
2. Search, or filter by theme, region and publisher. Near this project narrows the list to datasets that cover your site, and Live shows only the feeds that update.
3. Pick a dataset. Before you add it, you'll see its coverage, how often it updates, its licence and the credit line it needs.
4. Add it. The layer is saved with the project and clipped to the project's map area, so it sits over your scan in the right place.

The catalogue needs a project with real-world coordinates, for example a scan aligned to an MGA zone. A local scan with no coordinate system has nowhere on the map for the data to go.

Live layers

Live layers refresh while they're visible, so a client looking at a site during fire season sees the current incident map next to the capture.

When you connect your own source, you choose how often it refreshes, from every 30 seconds to every hour, or not at all.

Your own sources

If the dataset you need isn't in the catalogue, the My sources tab lets you connect your own:

• an ArcGIS feature or map service
• an OGC API or WFS service
• a GeoJSON link
• WMS, WMTS or XYZ image tiles, such as aerial imagery or a zoning map

You add a credit line for the source, and it's saved so you can use it again in other projects. Addresses are checked before MapShare fetches from them.

Licences and credits

Every catalogue entry shows its licence. Most government data is released under Creative Commons, but terms vary, and some sources limit commercial use. The catalogue says when that's the case. Check the terms before you use a layer in paid work.

The credit each publisher asks for is shown in the viewer whenever its layer is on, so you don't have to add it yourself.

What your client sees

Layers you add are part of the scene. People you share the project with can switch them on and off in the layer panel, next to the point cloud and the splat.

Try it

Open a georeferenced project and choose Add data. If you don't have an account yet, request access and tell us what you capture.