Queensland floods a call for spatial investment

I spent a while chatting to representatives from Australia at a forum in Singapore for geospatial professionals—organised by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)—towards the end of December.
Its message, in the light of the unfolding events in Brisbane and around Queensland, was quite prophetic.
It was that maps are central to all government decision making: they tell us where and who. The speed with which maps get made available by media outlets show just how much citizens crave spatial visibility when natural disaster strikes: it gives scale and context to an unfolding tragedy, but more importantly it enables governments to allocate resources and plan for future disasters.
The role of maps is key, I was told, for future ‘spatially-enabled’ societies in a digital age.
The OGC, a not-for-profit standards organisation founded in 1994, focuses on bringing worldwide national mapping agencies together with all the major providers of geospatial technologies (Earth imaging, GIS, navigation, facilities management, location services etc.) to create open geoprocessing standards.
Executive Director, Marketing and Communications at the OGC, Steve Ramage, writes in our January issue of FutureGov Asia Pacific: “Forward-thinking officials and government employees are becoming knowledgeable about Web-based information systems.”
That may be true. But as with everything involving governments in a digital age, issues abound on the role of the data—quality data—needed to create the services that will spatially enable agencies and give citizens the best chance of assessing their own circumstances.
At the moment, it seems that spatial information only gets its dues when natural disasters strike, and even then it is generally disaggregated and confusing to citizens. And yet, as we currently live and breath with mobile in hand, maps are all pervasive. We use them every day.
Investment in satellites for Australia has been touted as an answer to providing more accurate information in the upshot to the Queensland floods. The role of data and information collected and collated by citizens on the ground—through mobile phones—is another vast untapped resource for governments.
These will, you feel, play a vital role in creating spatially-enabled communities, and in linking governments to their sister departments and their citizens too.
One of the refrains I hear around data availability in Australia is around the freedom with which data is released for Mashup competitions—the Gov 2.0 devices used to get citizens creating iPhone applications—by governments.
Freeing up data sets held by large state and federal agencies has been an up-at-dawn pride-swallowing siege in Australia, by all accounts.
At the conference in Singapore, the overarching call was for more open standards around mapping and data and, in particular, for continuous funding as opposed to funding by cycles.
Two years on from the Black Saturday bushfires, which devastated communities in rural Victoria and left 173 people dead, Australia is again asking how communities could have better prepared.