Trekstep

Team Name

ElectronicallyE

Team Members

Project Description

Australians reside in the most liveable cities throughout the world with enviable surroundings. We have the opportunity to walk outside into captivating and picturesque environments, with an abondance of hidden gems to be discovered.

The greatest of adventures are those not planned. They allow us to escape our comfort zone and see the world through a different perspective, enabling us to discover our environment in addition to ourselves.

For many people, their neighbourhoods are perceived as monotonous landscapes filled with little more than houses, streets and footpaths. Combined with people’s repetitive lifestyles, we often do not have the opportunity to appreciate the surroundings of the places where we live, work and play.

Trekstep combines historical locations, landmarks and points of interest sourced from government datasets into a timed expedition within a user’s local area. Users are provided with a colour indicated arrow directing them towards the location and to signify proximity to the site. Users must find their own way to the location, recording their experience through a timestamped video journal at waypoints. This activity is repeated until all waypoints have been travelled to. At the conclusion of the expedition, the video journal, the route and completion time taken to all landmarks is published onto a social platform for others to see.

Trekstep creates a competitive and social platform for people to experience their surrounding environment, history, flora and fauna. The world is at your doorstep. Go find it.

Data Story

By sourcing landmark locations from numerous government datasets, people are taken to locations of historical and environmental significance, enabling them to develop a greater appreciation of their surrounding environment, flora and fauna.

FAIR Principles
• Findable: All datasets are sourced from data.sa.gov.au and data.gov.au and can be found via the search box on the data portals with ease. There was great difficulty in finding datasets containing flora sites of significant value, hence many of the datasets used are of heritage locations.
• Access: As the data does not require live and regular updates, access to the datasets was achieved via direct download.
• Interoperable: All datasets for Trekstep are location-based and use the GEOJSON file format. Importing, processing and uploading of these datasets can be achieved easily. The datasets are not standardised, requiring manual identification for what each column is representative of. Interoperability dictated what datasets were able to be used. A number of location-based datasets published to government data portals are of varying formats (CSV, HTML, etc.) which created significant difficultly when trying to process and visualise the data for suitability.
• Reusable: All user rights and licences can be found within the information page of each dataset. All locations within the datasets could be processed with minimal data loss. Exclusions have been made on sites deemed as sensitive, on private property or no longer in existence.