On Monday, Cabinet agreed to the development of a national spatial data infrastructure for New Zealand, and directed Government agencies to get involved now - at the development stage. Cabinet also mandated LINZ, through the NZGO, to assume a leadership role in driving the development of this infrastructure.

I'm sure that if you're reading this you're likely to be as excited about this news as I am.

I've spent a lot of time involved with information and communications technologies - especially since getting involved in politics. I was Minister of Communications, of Broadcasting, and Associate Minister of Research, Science and Technology in the early 1990s. How things have changed over the past 20 years.

It's vital to keep in mind the scope and nature of such change when looking at the need to build our technological capability, and our ability to connect and use the information and resources we have.

If I'd told one of my Cabinet colleagues back in 1990 to "Google" something, there's a good chance they would have thought I was mad. However, when faced with the same situation today, they would instantly know what I was talking about.

What has enabled such rapid change over such a short space of time? Solid groundwork and basic infrastructure.

The predecessor to the internet was being developed by 1980, and by 1990 the concept of the World Wide Web was first socialised. Fast forward 20 years, and the web is an integral part of today's society, enabling us to create, store, and share information in ways that were previously unimaginable.

I see the evolution of geospatial information to be a very similar thing.

A lot of work was done to develop standards and systems to share and use geospatial information over the 1980's and 1990's, and many countries have already used this foundation to build successful spatial data infrastructures.

The economic benefits of geospatial information were documented in a 2009 report, which estimates that geospatial information contributed about 1.2 billion dollar to New Zealand's economy in 2008.

The report states that if barriers to the use and re-use of spatial information were removed, New Zealand could have benefitted from an additional $481 million in productivity-related benefits in 2008, generating at least $100 million in government revenue.

I see government as having a key role to invest in a national spatial data infrastructure. As our economy becomes more knowledge driven, the infrastructures that underpin the open sharing of information become increasingly critical.

A lot of the key geospatial data sets are collected by central and local government, and we are best placed to lead the way in sharing this data.

The gains across a wide range of industries, within the private as well as public sectors, is to me the most exciting aspect of having a spatial data infrastructure in place. By joining up our information resources, more organisations can benefit from this information and are then better enabled to share and create solutions that will have positive impacts at all levels: social, environmental, cultural and economic.

The establishment of a spatial data infrastructure will be a shift in thinking for New Zealand, as we look away from locking down and owning data to seeing what we can achieve when we share our data.

Geospatial information is vital across all of my portfolios. It has applications across Building and Construction, Customs, Statistics and of course Land Information. It also has the potential to unlock areas ripe for innovation by businesses of all sizes.

As Minister for Land Information, I believe there are significant opportunities for government to work with the spatial sector to help advance New Zealand. The personal computer and the internet have been described as 'revolutionary'. I believe geospatial information, and how we access and share it, is at the heart of the information revolution.

As people become increasingly aware of the importance of location-based information - in a world where the internet provides information at the push of a button - it can only come further to the fore.

We all rely on services that are built using geospatial information every day. The infrastructures that support the environments where we live and work are built on the knowledge of where 'things' are in relation to other 'things'.  While most people on the street will not generally be familiar with terms like 'geospatial' or 'spatial data infrastructure', what they will recognise are the end benefits of better connecting this information.

Hon Maurice Williamson

Minister for Land Information