Gary Nairn, as a Surveyor and a former federal Minister with a passion for Spatial Information (SI), is well placed to make the observations about the future of SI [see his blog "A glimpse of the future", 29 July 2008]. There is no object on, above or beneath the Earth's surface that does not have, or could not be contained and referenced within a static or dynamic set of coordinates that enable all objects to be spatially placed and identified in relation to each other.
SI has come of age in recent years as people from a range of different disciplines and walks of life in the public and private sectors, academic institutions and the community generally have embraced the power and importance of SI to inform and achieve the social, economic and environmental outcomes sought by society.
At a time when the world is increasingly faced with a range of complex and interrelated challenges ranging from the use and management of natural resources, defence and sovereignty, communication, infrastructure planning and maintenance, counter terrorism and emergency services and the underlining cadastral and property rights, so critical to a functioning society, the challenge remains - how to accelerate the understanding, application and adoption of SI at all stages of ideas generation from policy and planning through to project implementation and monitoring.
We need a greater pace of adoption of known data sets and pathways for their interaction and adoption.
We need to increasingly distance the singular thought that SI is just an Information technology issue - SI is an information management issue and the information technology, a pathway to adoption and tool of transformational change. We need to simplify the pathways to adoption so the end users gain the benefits of adopting SI without having to understand, the fundamentally important technology, science and related disciplines which underpin the performance of SI.
As a result, one of the greatest challenges is to address the "institutional" barriers and structural failures that have hampered the wider understanding and adoption of SI across the public and private sectors. The advancement of the work by bodies such as ANZLIC, ASIBA, PSMA, CRCSI and SSI as individual structural bodies for SI, addressing issues from government policy and strategy, industry, research, development and commercialisation and the individual professionals, together with the work of academic institutions is to be applauded. However, the collaboration between these groups to achieve a tighter and more clearly focused agenda for SI is needed if we are to collectively meet the broad based challenges described previously.
The advent of the Australian Spatial Consortium (ASC) provides a framework and "meeting place" where these key bodies can collectively accelerate the necessary dialogue, scoping of ideas and the formulation of clear directions for the advancement of societies goals, underpinned by the dynamic power of SI. By itself, ASC will not singularly meet the challenge. However with the contribution of these established pillars within the "spatial church of different denominations" listed above it can harness their collective skills and knowledge without affecting their individual goals, so as to accelerate the understanding and adoption of SI.
Warwick Watkins is the Director General of the Department of Lands, Surveyor General and Registrar General of New South Wales.
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