Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications

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    Unfinished business: completing the mudmap on the riverbed - the legal lacuna in the tri-state area of the River Murray (Part 2)
    Park, M. M. ; Williamson, I. P. (Law Society of South Australia, 2008)
    With the approaching centenary of the Victorian-South Australian border litigation, the necessity of restoring and maintaining river flows in the Murray-Darling Basin river system including the equitable allocation of rights to those flows, and the failure of the four states and the Commonwealth to agree on the future co-operative administration of the Basin, the authors offer their resolution of the ‘missing’ border in the tri-state area of Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia in the locale of Mildura-Wentworth-Renmark where the three states abut. The resolution of the missing border is essential to the proper exercise of spatial or territorial jurisdiction. Although of small consequence for the past 150 years the time is approaching when this issue must be resolved: it is ‘unfinished business’.
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    Unfinished business: completing the mudmap on the riverbed - the legal lacuna in the tri-state area of the River Murray (Part 1)
    Park, M. M. ; Williamson, I. P. (Law Society of South Australia, 2008)
    With the approaching centenary of the Victorian-South Australian border litigation, the necessity of restoring and maintaining river flows in the Murray-Darling Basin river system including the equitable allocation of rights to those flows, and the failure of the four states and the Commonwealth to agree on the future co-operative administration of the Basin, the authors offer their resolution of the ‘missing’ border in the tri-state area of Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australiain the locale of Mildura-Wentworth-Renmark where the three states abut. The resolution of the missing border is essential to the proper exercise of spatial or territorial jurisdiction. Although of small consequence for the past 150 years the time is approaching when this issue must be resolved: it is ‘unfinished business’.
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    New roles of land administration systems
    Williamson, I. P. ; Wallace, J. ( 2007)
    This paper sketches the key issues in the history of land administration in terms relevant to the experiences of countries in the Asia Pacific Region. It is a first step in building a national land administration vision and is influenced by empirical research on European and Australian approaches. The vision is especially influenced by three trends in global land administration theory and practice, especially during the last five years and include: sustainable development; spatial enablement; and theoretical achievements in land administration.The challenges for modern land administration systems and in modern government are presented including the roles of land administration in formalizing land markets, implementing and understanding regulations and restrictions, and changing the nature of ownership. The role of spatial enablement and understanding the potential of iLand, the concept of integrated spatially enabled land information available on the Web, are central to understanding the national vision for land administration in Australia. Finally, future directions within technical and operational issues and collaboration and capacity building are presented to assist creation of a new land management model and national vision for spatially enabled land administration by countries in the APR.
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    Building land markets in the Asia Pacific region
    Williamson, I. P. ; Wallace, J. ( 2007)
    Land markets attract wide participation, all over the globe. Market activities receive intense analysis from economists and bankers, investors and developers, and they interest millions of people. Meanwhile, how to build a land market remains a mystery. Those countries that achieved effective modern land markets have the benefit of well run land administration systems. These systems therefore offer the key to building a market. The problem is that building land administration capacity does not always assist the creation and management of a successful land market. There are two explanations for this. First the complexity of a formal land market is not well understood. Second the different kinds of land administration infrastructures that are needed to support land markets as they develop from simple land trading into complex commodity markets need to be identified and implemented. These issues are explored below. The perspective of this exploration is that of an engineer interested in designing, building and managing the infrastructure needed to support modern land markets.
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    Spatially Enabling Government – an International Challenge
    Williamson, I. P. ; Rajabifard, A. ; Wallace, J. ( 2007)
    The popular use of spatial technologies involves showing images and tracking assets and inventory in an increasing array of instruments, the most common being the ubiquitous mobile phone. These technologies penetrate into even low income poor countries, but their take-up and development concentrates in highly developed countries. This high-end use of these technologies will determine their future. Remarkable as these popular applications are, spatial technologies can also be used in even more dynamic, transformational ways. Transformational use of spatial technologies occurs when they are used to improve business processes of government, and assist delivery of policies for equitable taxation, conservation of natural resources and planning for rational growth. Use of this transformational capacity of spatial technologies in government creates a spatially enabled government (SEG). The major impediment to take-up of spatial information is counter-intuitive. We all use the new technology in our daily lives, but our capacity to understand the power of spatial information is remarkably small. In fact only about 1% of people in any society really understand spatial information with about 5% of people knowing something about the special technology. For 95% of people, spatial information and its supporting technologies is a mystery. Teaching people about spatial information and its technologies is therefore the first task in painting a vision of what is possible. The attractions of spatial technologies lie in how they present information, whether users rely on computers and the Internet, or on communications technologies. The adage of a “picture tells a thousand words” is now out of date. New digital pictures tell many stories, and, if the enabling platform is built, the pictures will become management tools of government. Spatial technologies are moving quickly. In Australia, since October 2006, Google Maps and Google Earth, combined with a geocoded national address
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    Spatial Data Integration Challenges: Australian Case Studies
    MOHAMMADI, H ; RAJABIFARD, A ; BINNS, A ; WILLIAMSON, I (Spatial Sciences Institute, 2007)
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    Seamless SDI Model to Facilitate Spatially Enabled Land-Sea Interface
    SHEIKHESLAMI VAEZ, S ; RAJABIFARD, A ; BINNS, A ; WILLIAMSON, I (Spatial Sciences Institute, 2007)
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    The impact of land market processes on the poor in rural Vietnam
    Smith, W ; Williamson, I ; Burns, A ; Chung, TK ; Ha, NTV ; Quyen, HX (TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2007-01)
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    Bridging SDI design gaps
    MOHAMMADI, HOSSEIN ; RAJABIFARD, ABBAS ; BINNS, ANDREW ; Williamson, Ian P. (Centre of Geo-Information Technologies (cGIT), 2006)
    The environment we inhabit is integrated and to properly manage the environment it is necessary to look at all environmental components and making multi-criteria decision about environment mostly needs an integrated view of built and natural environmental components to better interpret it.Despite the integrated nature of environment and requirements of users to integrate different components of environment, information about different elements of environment is being collected and managed by fragmented agencies under different and mostly inconsistent policies and standards to satisfy their own needs –for a single discipline- with little attention to the broad range of users – a multi-disciplinary approach. This fragmentation results in heterogeneity of technical and non-technical issues surrounding integration of datasets.An SDI is an initiative to facilitate the cooperation among all stakeholders and the interaction with standards and technological components and one of its objectives is to facilitate the integration of multi-source spatial data sets.This paper aims to address different issues connected to the integration of multi-source data sets in order to better serve different communities through their SDI initiatives and also a better management and sharing of their spatial data. The paper aims to discuss both technical and non-technical issues related to the integration of multi-source data sets in alignment with an ongoing research project devoted to developing models, guidelines and associated tools to facilitate the integration of multi-source datasets within an SDI.
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    A new vision on cadastral data model
    Kalantari, Mohsen ; RAJABIFARD, ABBAS ; WALLACE, JUDE ; WILLIAMSON, IAN ( 2006)
    Land administration systems are evolving towards an integrated land management paradigm designed to support sustainable development. In this paradigm, land administration delivers four functionalities: land mapping, land registration, land valuation and land development, each with specific data elements, with the cadastral data model at the core. Cadastral data modelling potentially plays a key role in both data and business management in modern land administration systems. However, some modifications to existing data models could potentially improve their capacity to deliver sustainability. Firstly, the existing role of land parcels and properties as core building blocks in land administration systems can be significantly extended to make the cadastral fabric available to assist management of a wider range of rights, restrictions and responsibilities by using the concept of legal property objects: an entity defined by a law or regulation which relates to a physical space on, below or above the earth. This can be interpreted as a new land related commodity, land parcel or a property. Secondly, although land parcel and property identifiers are key elements of interoperability within land administration subsystems, the paper argues that they have not yet given appropriate emphasis in cadastral data models. Among the identifiers, spatial identifiers can potentially simplify data exchange and work flows among land administration functionalities on a much wider basis. Finally, the paper discusses technical issues raised by changing the cadastral model: the advantages and disadvantages of spatial identifiers, possibilities for spatially presenting rights restrictions and responsibilities, and consistency between various legal property objects.