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The Role of NSDI and Regional Cooperation for Sustainable GSDI – A Case Study of Australia


3. Institutional arrangements
In traditional set-up each government agency collects data they need individually, which leads to costly duplication of data and inconsistency between data sources. Instead of that data collected by individual agencies and shared by various stakeholders avoid duplication of efforts and provide consistent data for decision-making. The Australian set-up comprises a network of agencies that maintain standards, policies and cooperative arrangements to allow the sharing and integration of a wide range of geographic information held by various government agencies. The Australian approach to spatial data management aims to improve access for various stakeholders such as government, academia, industries and citizens. An important feature of ANZLIC is that it represents an extensive community of coordination arrangements in the public sector. ANZLIC comprises ten members representing the Australian Government, the New Zealand Government and each of the State and Territory Governments of Australia, representing their spatial information co-ordinating structure. Some jurisdictions have formalised these arrangements by creating coordinating bodies. This paper review best practices adopted by these coordinating bodies, in particular some aspects of:
  • the Western Australia Land Information System (WALIS);
  • the Queensland Spatial Information Infrastructure Council (QSIIC); and
  • the Commonwealth Office of Spatial Data Management (OSDM).
Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure (ASDI) is being promoted by ANZLIC incorporating information about datasets from different jurisdictions. In order to provide consistent spatial datasets a national program was initiated in 1998 under the auspices of ANZLIC to set-up Australian Spatial Data Directory (ASDD) that provides metadata. The directory comprises government and commercial nodes in each state/territory.

4. Regional Co-operation
The Commonwealth Government coordinates the spatial information activities of its agencies though the Commonwealth Spatial Data Council (CDSC), a member of ANZLIC, and more broadly though its lead agency for spatial information - AUSLIG. The ASDD is also hosted by the Commonwealth on behalf of ANZLIC and is managed by a group of Commonwealth agencies headed by AUSLIG. The Commonwealth’s spatial data policy consist of three tier coordination agreement (as illustrated in figure - 1) between senior executive policy group (CSDPE), a technical management committee (CSDMG) and a small project office (OSDM) for regional cooperation.


Figure - 1 Roles and responsibilities of Commonwealth agencies

The coperation mechanisms between the Commonwealth, States and territories creates croos-portfolio spatial data coordination artrangements between following key spatial custodians:

  • Australian Bureau of Statistics
  • Australian Electoral Commission
  • Australian Hydrographic Service
  • Australian Maritime Safety Authority
  • Australian Oceanographic Data Centre
  • Bureau of Meteorology
  • Bureau of Rural Sciences
  • CSIRO
  • Department of Family & Community Services
  • Department of Health & Ageing
  • DIGO, Department of Defence
  • Environment Australia
  • Geoscience Australia (formerly AGSO and AUSLIG)
  • Murray-Darling Basin Commission
  • National Land and Water Resources Audit
  • National Native Title Tribunal

To ensure effective use of huge government resources, metadata is used to raise awareness by describing content, currency and availability of data. The data collected and maintained by custodians at local level under standard metadata guidelines, which provides compliance with regional, national and international standards. The custodians are responsible for ensuring the reliability of their data and services component including conformance testing, performance monitoring, node status reporting, data and metadata quality. Furthermore, it is a liability of node administrator to supply dataset description to all network clients including scale and resolution of the data at free cost after getting authority to publish from the data custodians.

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