Major Policy Breakthroughs Announced at Spatial@Gov 2012

The first day of this year’s Spatial@Gov conference saw two major government policy announcements: the establishment of a National Foundation Spatial Data Framework, and the imminent whole-of-government licence of PSMA’s Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF).

The National Foundation Spatial Data Framework defines the ten data themes that form the authoritative geographic data layers that underpin other data and decision making. The policy recognises these as so critical that government will focus its energy and resources on ensuring its authoritative, reliable supply.

The whole-of-government G-NAF licence means that individual departments no longer need to separately get a G-NAF licence, saving a lot of money and greatly extending its potential utilisation. It is my hope that this could extend beyond government as well.

More diversity needed at Spatial@Gov

Day three heralded the graveyard shift for the speakers at Spatial-at-gov 2010. It was a case of speaking in the morning, while delegates were still fuzzy after the night before, or speaking in the afternoon, when everyone's waiting to go home.

I had the morning slot, in the government 2.0 stream, to talk about Where 2.0 and Neogeography. Despite geo-beers the night before, the room was full, and the audience seemed attentive to hear about Paradigm shifts and Bushfire Connect. The slides can be found here.

Spatial@Gov - Day 2

The second day of the Spatial-at-gov conference was the first 'real' conference day. A morning of keynotes and an afternoon of parallel sessions, followed by the Conference Dinner, which doubled as the annual Spatial Excellence awards night.

To a large extent, it was business as usual for a typical spatial event: lots of inward looking observations, lamenting that our industry remains so misunderstood, and mild outrage if someone dares to mispronounce (or take the Mickey out of) our beloved SSSI. Oh, and death by PowerPoint. Slow and painful.

Spatial@Gov - Day 1

Yesterday the 2nd spatial@gov conference kicked off in Canberra, with among other events, an open day, a series of workshops and presentations, and the highly anticipated launch of the Bureau of Meteorology's GeoFabric.