This paper describes the on-telescope performance of the Wide Field Spectrograph (WiFeS). The design characteristics of this instrument, at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) of the Australian National University (ANU) and mounted on the ANU 2.3 m telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory has been already described in an earlier paper (Dopita et al. in Astrophys. Space Sci. 310:255, 2007). Here we describe the throughput, resolution and stability of the instrument, and describe some minor issues which have been encountered. We also give a description of the data reduction pipeline, and show some preliminary results.

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Data owners are creating an ever richer set of information resources online, and these are being used for more and more applications. Spatial data on the Web is becoming ubiquitous and voluminous with the rapid growth of location-based services, spatial technologies, dynamic location-based data and services published by different organizations. However, the heterogeneity and the peculiarities of spatial data, such as the use of different coordinate reference systems, make it difficult for data users, Web applications, and services to discover, interpret and use the information in the large and distributed system that is the Web. To make spatial data more effectively available, this paper summarizes the work of the joint W3C/OGC Working Group on Spatial Data on the Web that identifies 14 best practices for publishing spatial data on the Web. The paper extends that work by presenting the identified challenges and rationale for selection of the recommended best practices, framed by the set of principles that guided the selection. It describes best practices that are employed to enable publishing, discovery and retrieving (querying) spatial data on the Web, and identifies some areas where a best practice has not yet emerged.

The volume of data being published on the Web and made available as Open Data has significantly increased over the last several years. However, data published by independent publishers are sliced and fragmented. Creating descriptive connections across datasets may considerably enrich data and extend their value. One way to standardize, describe and interconnect the information from heterogeneous data sources is to use Linked Data as a publishing technology.

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