The Australian Politics Resource
About APR
History
The Australian Politics Resource (APR) began its life around 1994 as a series of text documents, available on the Internet through the gopher service.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol soon emerged, paving the way for the World Wide Web, and APR was right at the forefront of the new technology.
APR was hosted at the Australian Defence Force Academy between 1994 and 2000, first on the SUN sparcStation known as "ccadfa" and later on a desktop PC known as "Plato". In its heyday it was referenced by many universities around the world and welcomed over 1 million visitors each year.
APR has a proud record of innovation. It was the first Internet resource to provide detailed policy information for State and federal elections, the first to deliver detailed federal budget information on Budget night, and provided the first web presence for Australian political parties, big and small.
Today APR is hosted on a desktop PC in the home office of David Moss, near Warwick in Queensland.
The Future
Currently APR is experimenting with the Semantic Web. Each entry in the organisations section is already marked up for machine use using RDFa. The plan is to develop a triplestore database that links together facts about people and political organisations and serve the information as both traditional web pages and semantic web services. A sneak preview of this work can be viewed here.
Equipment
APR is currently hosted on an IBM X Series 346 server with 2 Gb of memory. The operating system is Solaris 10. APR is served by an Apache 2 web server and employs PHP and MySQL technology in the back end. APR connects to the Internet using G3 wireless at 7Mb/s. Host and communications are powered by a small UPS with approximately 20 minutes of battery backup.
