On 3 August, 2010, LINZ's New Zealand Geospatial Office (NZGO) and the New Zealand branch of the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI) hosted a one day symposium, where attendees from government, private sector, research and academic organisations heard about some of the latest thinking in New Zealand and Australia on spatial data infrastructure (SDI). Download the presentations:

• Mary Sue Severn - Mobilising SDI (introduction)
• Kevin Sweeney - New Zealand Geospatial Office Work Programme
• Bruce Thompson - Mobilising SDI
• David Swann - VGI Meet SDI
• Isabella Cawthorn - Gateway catalogue: discovering NZ's publicly-funded environmental & geospatial data
• Michael Ridout - Spatially Enabling Australia and New Zealand
• Simon Jellie - Enabling Address Exchange and Validation
• Wendy Lawson - Masters in Geographic Information Science
• Kylie Armstrong - Program 3: Spatial Infrastructure

A few of the most compelling themes from the presentations and discussions were:

• Public good is a compelling driver for the implementation of a national SDI
• Australia is grappling with a lot of the same issues as New Zealand and there is a real desire for close collaboration between our two countries to tackle some of the "wicked problems".

We are in a great position today to undertake some of the research work needed to establish a successful Australia New Zealand Spatial Marketplace.

Upcoming workshops

There's a lot of work to be done to implement an SDI in New Zealand and end-user focussed research is a critical component.  A key objective of the symposium was to enable attendees to table their thoughts about the types of research which needs to be done to support an SDI and some great ideas were raised.  We have selected two of these for further exploration and will be holding workshops so that we can commence the development of content for the proposals.  The topics are:

• Addressing - the development of a common framework for organisations to more easily share and validate address information
• Crowd Sourcing - how the geospatial community might embrace and take advantage of information generated by the public (e.g. crowd sourced) which may not necessarily be "authoritative".

Who can attend these workshops?

People who attended the symposium will be receiving their invitation to this workshop by email. If you were unable to attend the symposium and wish to receive an invitation to these workshops, please send an email to msevern@linz.govt.nz.

You do not have to be a CRCSI member to attend, however, if you wish to be part of a CRCSI-funded project, your organisation will need to join CRCSI.

How to join CRCSI

CRCSI participants enjoy some notable benefits, including access to IP, networking across the technical and business spectrum, funding for R&D for business improvement, access to experts, new markets and new technologies.  As mentioned above, your organisation will need to become a participant in order to be part of a research team. Download "How do I join CRCSI?" and contact Mary Sue Severn (msevern@linz.govt.nz) for more information.

For more information

Mary Sue Severn

Director CRCSI New Zealand
New Zealand Geospatial Office
msevern@linz.govt.nz
+64 4 460 0188
www.crcsi.co.nz