Spatial Data Integration Challenges: Australian Case Studies

To manage the complex environment it is necessary to manage all aspects through the integration of its built and natural components. The integration of multi-sourced built and natural environmental datasets is essential for facilitating government policy drivers including hazard management, counter-terrorism, environment protection and land administration. Sustainable development, which overarches these activities, is the most major motive for the Governments of Australia. Hence, the integration of multi-sourced spatial data is of importance to Australia. Multi-sourced data integration is not only the technical collation of data, but also efforts to explore, assess, communicate with data providers, access, acquire, convert, and collate data. However fragmentation of institutions leads to an inconsistency in data coordination approaches, especially in the integration of spatial data. Inconsistency of spatial datasets has turned integration into an expensive and time-consuming task. Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) aims to provide a dynamic environment in which different stakeholders are able to easily access and use data in the minimum time with minimum cost. Therefore any SDI aims to facilitate data integration to minimize effort, time and cost. This paper investigates spatial data integratability and interoperability within Australia based on a case study methodology involving the states of Victoria, NSW and the Federal Government. Integration issues and activities are described and also best practice has been identified within each case study, and suggested way forward on integration made. These suggestions will feed in to the development of an overall framework for integration at a National level utilising SDI. BIOGRAPHY OF PRESENTER Hossein Mohammadi is a PhD candidate, Centre for SDI and Land Administration at the University of Melbourne. Hossein has completed a Masters Degree of GIS in KNT University in Tehran.