GIS - Narural Resources Group
Paul Langham
I have attended a few meetings recently, some of which are relevant to
us the but first was basically a presentation by DOC and LINZ
regarding their joint development project. This was of interest but
is still in it's very early stages, but they did note areas of
interest and concern from all parties there, which included central
government agencies, local government, SOE's, and private sector. Of
note was the fact that they were not envisioning any change to
Landonline. There is a separate paper on this by Paul Hughes of DOC
after consulting with a number of agencies, including David Kingi from
MLC and myself. The thrust of this is that the Landonline data should
be available in a format that is useful i.e. by title area rather than
just by survey block and available as a web service rather than just
dump the BDE each month which then requires processing by a 3rd party
to make it useable (and charge for the output accordingly).
The meeting I found to be of greater interest was the SDI (Spatial
Data Infrastructure), group. The aim here is to create a central
catalogue of available spatial data together with details of access to
the data as a web service. It's a federated model so the data will be
available from whoever owns the data and is maintaining it. There are
issues such as standards and metadata to be finally resolved but the
aim is to have the initial datasets available by the end of the first
quarter next year. Agencies involved are LINZ, DOC, MAF, MFE, Min
Fish, NZTA, and TPK. Between them there is a rich source of data.
I have also had discussions with Eagle regarding an ELA for the
Natural Resources sector, and, more particularly, the possibility of
an ELA for Iwi organisations. The basic idea is that for a fixed
cost, based on the size of the organisation, they would have access to
whatever ESRI software they want to use. It counts as a licence in
that if you terminate the ELA payments you can continue to use the
software that you have installed but not get any further updates, or
start paying maintenance to get the updates. I have yet to get cost
estimates, or to work out how we will determine the costs applicable
to individual Iwi. Also to be determined is how it will be
administered as they want to deal with a central co-ordinator (TPK was
suggested but I'm quite relaxed about that and have not taken it
further internally). What I need to know is whether there would be
interest in pursuing this.
On another note, I have been collating a national marae directory.
Initially this is being used here to look at marae that may be under
threat from a rise in the sea level, but we envisage many uses for
this data. The current list has been collated from a large number of
places - all that I could find, and we have been through a cleansing
process as best we can. What I would really like is to have the data
vetted by the people who really know - you. I would value your input
as to how this can best be achieved, one option is to publish the data
on our GIS web site when we roll out the new version early nex year.
This version has several enhancements in addition to the provision of
additional layers, the most relevant being a feeback capability.
Paul