Development of a Virtual Australia Utilising an SDI Enabled Platform

TLDR

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is an evolving platform that links data producers, providers, and users, and many nations invest in SDIs to enable collaborative, distributed virtual systems for better decision‑making, requiring efficient access and delivery of spatial information—a challenge more complex than technical issues. The paper aims to show how Australia’s CRC‑SI can provide a single entry point to spatial information and tools, and how SDIs can enable the construction and delivery of a Virtual Australia with minimal data impediments across state and national levels. The authors propose integrating state and national SDIs into a seamless Virtual Australia, using an SDI hierarchy model that allows minimal data impediments and provides a basis for assessing best practices and performance indicators across policy, technology, and institutional frameworks. Virtual Australia offers benefits beyond spatial representation, incorporating administrative and institutional aspects to enable technical and institutional decision‑making.

Abstract

SUMMARY Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) which is an evolving concept and can be viewed as an enabling platform linking data producers, providers and value adders to data users. With this in mind, many nations and jurisdictions are investing in developing such platforms and infrastructures that enable their stakeholders to work together in a more mutual approach to create distributed virtual systems that support better decision-making. The success of these systems depend on collaboration between all parties and need to be designed to support efficient access, retrieval and delivery of spatial information to where it is needed. Within Australia, through the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRC-SI), there is a vision to provide a single entry point to SI, modeling and visualization tools, making spatial information available and useful to all – at any time and in any place. This requires the seamless integration of SDIs at different levels including state and national to form a virtual jurisdiction such as Virtual Australia, providing a foundation for identifying best practice and key performance indicators of SDIs in terms of their policy, technology and institutional frameworks. This paper will discuss how SDIs can be used as an enabling platform in the construction and delivery of a Virtual Australia, based on the SDI hierarchy model where data flows with minimal impediments within and between state and federal/national levels. The benefits of Virtual Australia will be more than just the representation of feature based structures of the world, it will also include the administration and institutional aspects of such features, enabling both technical and institutional aspects to be incorporated into decision-making. This is an aspect of research identified as more challenging than complex technical issues.