Development of a Virtual Australia Utilising an SDI Enabled Platform

Abstract

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) which is an evolving concept and can be viewed as anenabling platform linking data producers, providers and value adders to data users. With thisin mind, many nations and jurisdictions are investing in developing such platforms andinfrastructures that enable their stakeholders to work together in a more mutual approach tocreate distributed virtual systems that support better decision-making. The success of thesesystems depend on collaboration between all parties and need to be designed to supportefficient 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, makingspatial information available and useful to all – at any time and in any place. This requires theseamless integration of SDIs at different levels including state and national to form a virtualjurisdiction such as Virtual Australia, providing a foundation for identifying best practice andkey performance indicators of SDIs in terms of their policy, technology and institutionalframeworks.This paper will discuss how SDIs can be used as an enabling platform in the construction anddelivery of a Virtual Australia, based on the SDI hierarchy model where data flows withminimal impediments within and between state and federal/national levels. The benefits ofVirtual Australia will be more than just the representation of feature based structures of theworld, it will also include the administration and institutional aspects of such features,enabling both technical and institutional aspects to be incorporated into decision-making. Thisis an aspect of research identified as more challenging than complex technical issues.