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July 2003 |
An Australian Perspective
Government
- Has a long history of capturing core spatial data;
- Has a culture of quality capture;
- Produces spatial data as a by-product of its normal work;
- Is slow to respond to change; and
- Is reluctant to spend taxpayers' dollars on entrepreneurial ventures.
The Private Sector
- Responds to change rapidly;
- Is willing to take risks and create different products for different markets; and
- Often has earlier access to the latest technologies.
It seems that to build an effective NSDI the strengths of both sectors should be utilised. Private-Public Co-operation is the key to building an NSDI that enhances overall economic growth. One-sided initiatives that rely solely on technology have inevitably failed.
Australian Case Study
Australia is a federation of states and territories and each has its own strong surveying and mapping agency. The Commonwealth (National) government also has a central agency responsible for managing spatial information, however it has no legal control over the states and territories. Essentially there are nine autonomous survey and mapping agencies in Australia, and this has been a major impediment to the creation of a truly national Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure or ASDI.
However, there is strong support across all of these jurisdictions to build the ASDI and a number of initiatives have been commenced to achieve this. The following describes one of these initiatives, which has been extremely successful in building the foundation of the ASDI. It has also, very importantly, associated processes that give ready data access to a large number of value-adders who in turn use the data to build solutions for numerous different markets.
PSMA Australia
Over ten years ago, in response to the regionalised nature of the Government Surveying and Mapping organisations in Australia, the Public Sector Mapping Agencies (PSMA) was formed. The PSMA is a self-funded, corporatised government body whose key objective is to combine the individual jurisdictional spatial datasets into National datasets. The PSMA's vision is:
"The return of economic benefits to the nation through the co-ordination assembly and delivery of standards-compliant, client-specific, national datasets from fundamental databases held by the member agencies."
The PSMA has a powerful public sector board drawn from the member agencies. The core role of the PSMA is as a co-ordinator and it has only a small staff of less than five people. It contracts all data production work to the private sector.
Most significantly it does not deal directly with end-users - this is carried out entirely through the private sector. Figure 1 illustrates the PSMA Business Model.
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