Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemAwareness as a foundation for developing effective spatial data infrastructures( 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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ItemCapacity Building for SDIs( 2003)Capacity building is an essential component of any institutional reform such as building land administration infrastructures or spatial data infrastructures (SDI). However the capacity building concept is often used within a narrow meaning such as focusing on staff development through formal education and training programmes to meet the lack of qualified personnel in a project in the short term. This article argues that capacity building measures should be addressed in the wider context of developing and maintaining institutional infrastructures in a sustainable way, even if the key focus may be on education and training to meet short and medium term needs. This article develops the capacity building concept and looks at capacity assessment and capacity development as the two key components. Within capacity development it considers the levels and dimesions of capacity.The paper then introduces the evolving SDI concept and explores how capacity building is essential in delivering an operational SDI. In order to resolve the difficulty of applying the complex and often unclear nature of capacity building to the evolving and similarly unclear nature of SDI, capacity building for SDI in Australia is used as a case study.The paper also identifies that the SDI concept is less easily transferred to developing countries and as such raises the role of SDIs in developing countries as an important un-answered question for the Permanent Committee on GIS Infrastructure for Asia and the Pacific to consider.
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ItemThe Cadastral Template Project( 2004)While many country reports have been compiled in the area of land administration over thelast decade, there has not much attention been given to the basic cadastral issues. As a result,one of the objectives of Working Group 3 "Cadastre" of the PCGIAP is the establishment of acadastral template, which is basically a standard form to be filled out by cadastralorganizations presenting their national cadastral system. The aims are to understand the rolethat a cadastre plays in a state or national SDI and to compare best practice as a basis forimproving cadastres as a key component of SDIs.The work of the PCGIAP-Working Group 3 "Cadastre" is being done in collaboration withCommission 7 "Cadastre and Land Management" of the International Federation ofSurveyors (FIG), which has extensive experience in comparative cadastral studies. Thisarticle describes the creation and the content of the cadastral template and the expectedoutcomes.
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ItemIncorporating sustainable development objectives into land administration( 2006)Historically, land administration systems (LAS) were built to support land markets and land taxation systems. In developed countries, these systems constitute substantial infrastructure provided through government for the benefit of overall public administration, citizens and businesses. These systems are expensive to maintain and increasingly reliant on technology. The design of LAS will become even more complex as they are now being used to assist delivery of a broader range of public policy and economic goals, the most important of which is sustainable development. The national and historical methods used to incorporate sustainable development objectives into national LAS were examined in an Expert Group Meeting (EGM) in Melbourne in December, 2006 with leading stakeholders and land policy experts from Australia and Europe. Distinctions between approaches used in modern European democracies and in Australia were identified. The European approach showed more integration between the standard LAS activities and measures of sustainability. Australian policy was more fractured, partly due to federation and the constitutional distribution of powers. In contrast, Australian LAS pioneering lay in incorporating market based instruments (MBI) and complex commodities into LAS and revitalization of land information through inventive Web based initiatives. The EGM developed a vision outlined in this paper for future LAS sufficiently flexible to adapt to this changing world of new technology, novel market demands and sustainable development.