Spatial Modelling With Cellular Automata

In 2003 the Department of Land Information in Western Australia (DLI) brought on stream it’s new Landgate Portal unified web access point to all of state government information.

Landgate brings together technology offerings from some of the world's leading vendors in the Spatial Sector. One of the technologies being used to delivery Imagery is Australia’s own ER Mapper’s Image Web Server (IWS), which was developed in Perth, WA. IWS recently won the ASIBA’s spatial excellence award for Research and innovation.

Landgate service was developed to provide access to spatial information across government agencies as well as to many business sector clients and community groups. It has achieved this by providing various user channels such as conveyancing, industry, surveying, planning and many others are planned.

Key agencies such as the Water Corporation and Fire and Emergency services (FESA) have come out strongly in support of this service. Sharing of data means agencies can get on with the business of developing their own plans rather than worry about key spatial assets required to underpin their operations.

Part of DLI’s mandate was to provide online distribution of over 5 terabytes of aerial photography to a variety of Government, Industry and free-to-air Public applications. To meet this need, DLI approached ER Mapper to develop a web application that would integrate the imagery from their Image Web Server with the cadastral data served from a GIS Server. This would be available to a variety of clients in a multi-channel deployment from the Landgate Portal

ER Mapper used our RightWebMap product, a rapid development tool, to develop an application called Map Viewer which is launched from the Landgate Portal allowing viewers to display multiple airphoto images in a “layered view” stack overlaid with the Cadastral vector information.

The fusion of WA's spatial imagery assets with other land information assets provides fast and fluid information sharing. Deploying ER Mapper’s Image Web Server and RightWebMap technologies made this fusion possible. This technology allowed DLI to integrate information that was previously separated and to create new business opportunities in the state.

This paper would look at the Landgate project, the strategic relationship with DLI and ER Mapper, which enable some of the new innovation to be developed, a quick presentation on the Landgate – MapViewer application and more some of the future directions of DLI.