Spatial data integration challenges: Australian case studies
The world of today heavily relies on spatial data to respond to the complex nature of decisions on different aspects of the environment. Making such decisions is not possible unless there is an ability to control the environment through the integration of its built and natural components. The integration of built and natural datasets is also essential for facilitating the Australian federal and state governments’ priorities including hazard management, environment protection and land administration. Hence, the data integration is a significant issue in Australia.
In Australia each state is responsible to obviate its own mapping and data coordination needs. Within each state, councils are also a major provider and consumer of spatial data. They liaise with states to capture and maintain spatial data for their use. The inconsistencies of approaches among different jurisdictions cause heterogeneity among datasets. Inconsistency of spatial datasets has turned integration to an expensive and time-consuming task. In order to overcome these inconsistencies some activities have been initiated to facilitate the interaction at different governmental levels. Despite significant efforts, jurisdictions still suffer from the lack of a comprehensive initiative to facilitate data integration.
Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) aim to provide a dynamic environment in which different stakeholders are able to easily access to and use data in minimum time with minimum cost. Therefore any SDI aims to facilitate data integration to minimize effort, time and cost of data integration.
This paper investigates data integration within Australia based on a case study methodology involving the states of Victoria, NSW and the Federal Government. Integration issues and activities are described within each case study, and recommendations on integration made. These recommendations will feed in to the development of an overall framework for integration at a National level utilising SDIs.