Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications

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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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    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.
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    Awareness as a foundation for developing effective spatial data infrastructures
    CLAUSEN, CHRISTIAN ; RAJABIFARD, ABBAS ; ENEMARK, STIG ; WILLIAMSON, IAN ( 2006)
    The development of an effective spatial data infrastructure (SDI) often occurs in a fragmented organizational environment requiring a high level of inter-organizational collaboration. Different organizations from various jurisdictions needs to work together closely when agreeing on how they will jointly register, store, use and share data and how they will make their data available to the wider society. This collaboration is generally regarded as very difficult. In particular, organizational issues are considered one of the key fundamental constraints to inter-organizational sharing of spatial data. But what makes collaboration effective and successful? For example people often resist sharing data across organizational boundaries due to loss of control, power and independency. In the spatial community, the term awareness is often used when discussing issues concerned with inter-organizational collaboration. However, a major problem by using the term awareness in discussions of inter-organizational collaboration is that awareness is undefined and often misused as a term in the spatial data handling community. The (over)-use of the term awareness, without having a rigorous definition to rely upon increases the difficulty of understanding and developing collaboration issues. The difficulty in quantifying and describing issues in collaboration make the development of effective spatial data infrastructures problematic since this development should be based on a conceptual framework that clearly addresses the problems spatial organizations currently encounter. As a result, the focus of this paper is on the nature and role of awareness. It explores why and how awareness plays a fundamental role in overcoming organizational constraints and in developing collaboration between organizations. The paper discusses the concept of awareness in the area of organizational collaboration in the spatial community, explains the important role awareness plays in the development of spatial data infrastructures, and introduces a methodology to promote awareness. Furthermore, the paper aims to make people in the community more aware of the use of the term "awareness" – when to use it, how to use it and especially important, how not to use it. The paper will use land administration systems as the discipline for investigating awareness.
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    Integration of Built and Natural Environmental Datasets Within National SDI Initiatives
    WILLIAMSON, IP ; RAJABIFARD, A (United Nations Regional Cartographic Conference for Asia and the Pacific, 2006)
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    Spatially Enabling Governments: A New Vision for Spatial Information
    WILLIAMSON, IP ; WALLACE, J ; RAJABIFARD, A (United Nations Regional Cartographic Conference for Asia and the Pacific, 2006)
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    The development of a frameworkand associated tools for the integration ofmulti-sourced spatial datasets
    Mohammadi, H. ; Binns, A. ; Rajabifard, A. ; Williamson, I. P. ( 2006)
    The world of today heavily relies on spatial data to manage the natural and built environments.Monitoring and controlling the impact of human activities on environment and the impact of naturalenvironment changes (including natural hazards) on built environment is a major policy driver formany jurisdictions. The mitigation of natural hazards including tsunami, earthquake and landslide andsecuring citizens against them has become another priority of nations , especially after Indonesia’stsunami. September 11 was also a remarkable point in history which attracts attentions towardsproviding more efficient counter-terrorism initiatives to secure citizens.In many countries meeting sustainable development objectives including social cohesion andenvironment protection together with economical growth is the most overwhelming policy driver. Inthese countries most of legislations and decisions are made, if they meet sustainable developmentobjectives.All above mentioned activities try to control the natural and built environments and monitor theimpacts of one environment on the other one. To control and monitor built and natural environments,the components of these environments need to be integrated to provide the factual model of realworld. Effective access and use of spatial data has been addressed by developing SDIs (Spatial DataInfrastructures) which one of its objectives is to address and provide requirements for effective dataintegration.The effective integration of built and natural environmental datasets is an ultimate goal of manyspatial decision making systems which has not been fully achieved, however technical integration andinteroperability of multi-sourced spatial data have received much attention. The integration of multisourcedspatial data due to the diversity of data providers needs more than technical tools andconsiderations. Institutional, social, legal and policy requirements must also be taken intoconsideration in order to achieve effective integratio