There is a spatial revolution coming

| October 11, 2011
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Chief Executive Officer of the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI), Peter Woodgate, delivered the following opening address at Global Access Partners' National Economic Review 2011: Australia’s Annual Growth Summit on Friday 16 September 2011.

I happen to run a cooperative research centre called Spatial Information. We have 100 partners, 70 companies, 20 government agencies and 20 research institutes from overseas and locally. Our industry is all about positioning, mapping, and imaging – GPS systems, satellite imaging, advanced analysis capabilities and visualisation systems. It's an industry that's contributing about $10 billion to GDP each year. It employs about 51,000 people. We have a serious problem, 3000 vacancies or positions are in need of urgent up-skilling, compounded by the fact that our industry is growing at 10 to 15% per annum.

There is a spatial revolution coming and we haven't seen anything yet. Over the next five to eight years, the US GPS system that we've all come to know and use will be joined by five additional competing systems from China, Japan, India, Europe and Russia. Australia has a wonderful and somewhat unique opportunity to see all the signals from all those systems. If we develop the capability to read them, we will be able to develop systems that will give us the ability to position anybody, anywhere, anytime, in real time, outdoors to two centimetres true.

Australian Population in Focus logoWell, so what? It is going to add, so the economists tell us, $32 billion to the Australian economy. Why? It won't be because we're going to improve our golf game. It'll be because we'll be able to introduce high precision agriculture technologies and controlled traffic farming. We will be able to have fully automated robotic minds. We're going to have enormous efficiencies in the building of our major assets.
 
The second part of that revolution is going to be in imaging satellite and aircraft technologies. It's taken us 40 years to get about 160 civilian imaging satellites up in space. Over the next 10 years, that number is going to double. But it's not just the sheer number of those satellites. It's the fact that those satellites are going to have enormously improved resolving capacities.
 
Some of them will be geostationary. That means that they're going to be looking at us 100% of the time, night and day. They're going to be like videos that are always on. Others are orbiting and they're going to be orbiting with really smart technologies like radar that will see through the clouds, smoke and rain, operate at night and day and pick up any moving object. They'll pick up any object in fact. Others are going to be able to detect heat. We're going to be able to map far more accurately fires, or any moving hot object.
 
There'll be so much information coming from these systems that we won't be able to ingest it all. But it's the information that's the revolution for us, because the information gives us the ability to do really smart things. For example, during the recent Queensland floods, these satellites mapped night and day the extent and severity of the flooding and are now being used to help us map, along with smart aircraft systems, the damage and the need for rehabilitation.
 
But this information will also be used in other industries as well, like the health industry. We can combine this information with the really smart population demographics data that Prof Bob Birrell talked about earlier and the ABS information to analyse the distribution of diseases accurately, right across the country, to understand the cause and factors in ways that will give us piercing insights we didn't have the opportunity to develop before.
 
To do that and to identify where we can put the best resources, hospitals, GP clinics, and to target that massive health expenditure far more effectively, that information and those technologies are also going to combine with the gaming technologies, one of the fastest growing industries – bigger than movies and the music industry. The gaming technologies of simulation, optimisation and logistics are all coming together with the spatial technologies. We have the capacity literally, within the next three years, to develop virtual cities, fully worked, full metrics, understanding the energy usage, the resource usage, the movement of people and vehicles. Doing that will enable us to manage our risks far more effectively, to model scenarios, to answer the ‘what if?’ questions in the virtual environment well before we commit to construction and the implications that construction brings.
 
So there's a little insight for us into what's coming from an information technology perspective and its ability to influence a whole range of different industries. In fact, I have a suggestion for us. It would be a wonderful thing to do if we could, say, look at the 400 or so ABS industry subsectors and to ask ourselves what would happen as a nation, a knowledge working nation, if we were able to fully enable those industries with these smart technologies.
 
We could go further. We could ask ourselves what skill capacity do we need to take optimum advantage of that, and then identify what areas within the universities and our colleges of advanced education are needed to provide the skills, training and courses to fulfil the needs of Australia to actually develop a strategic plan for the nation and a bit of a roadmap for doing that, linking training all the way through to end usage of these technologies. It's our estimation, if we did it for our little industry, that it would add $5 billion to GDP on its own. What if we did it across all technologies for the nation? What if we were like China and we did it as a five-year plan?
 
 
Dr Peter Woodgate has been the CEO of the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI) since 2003. The CRCSI operates across Australia and New Zealand and has 110 partners investing in advanced capabilities for improving the use of global navigation satellite systems, satellite and airborne image analysis and the use of spatial data. Peter is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Digital Earth, Director of the Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network, Board member of the UNESCO World Heritage International Centre on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage in China, foundation Chairman of the Global Spatial Network for Networks and Chairman of the Research Committee of UNESCO’s Mornington Peninsula and Westernport Biosphere Reserve. He has a Doctorate in Business Administration from RMIT University, a Master of Applied Science from the University of New South Wales and a Degree in Forest Science from the University of Melbourne.
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  1. Brad Spencer

    Brad Spencer

    October 18, 2011 at 10:09 pm

    Spatial Revolution & reality

    Peter,

    I share your enthusiasm for the flood of spatial data coming. The CRC will certainly contribute to the needed research on how it can be of benefit. However, I have a couple of concerns:

    • I am concerned with the perceived costs per benefits of such data. For example, as you know many remote sensing companies acquire imagery today over highly populated areas or areas of interest. The result is that a lot of imagery, which is currency critical, is used only by a small fraction of our community when it is most current. The use of this data for the greater good as it were is perceived to be highly costly for the benefits it can deliver. I understand that this is a classic project environment where imagery is typically acquired on consignment. Very few exceptions exist that promote blanket coverage followed by commodity commercial distribution. The satellite model must change this. There are many SME businesses out there that could be using current aerial/satellite imagery to improve productivity and competition but it must be affordable. Its no different to the NBN in that the cost of building and maintaining such an infrastructure must have the broadest client base and to achieve that its pricing must be set to encourage maximum take-up.
    • I also think that we in the ‘Spatial Industries’ should start to work smarter to get over this skills shortage. Collaborate and don’t reinvent wheels everywhere. Embrace a distributed environment that the Internet delivers and improve our productivity as well. We have mountains of spatial data still in silos that we are not sharing. The reputable ABS Census data is a classic example; there are thousands of copies dished out after each Census and in many cases many people are doing the same things with that data. We have alternatives to connect to this data online via Software as a Service model now and when the next [2011] Census data is released in August 2012, but will we? When you talk of ‘Virtual Australia’ I too get very excited but if we cannot build and maintain a Spatial Data Infrastructure at a Federal level in this country I am concerned that a Virtual Australia will be a toy of the elite few and not a commodity service for the broader community thus making it a very expensive toy.

    We have a lot of work to do!

    Brad…