Position 99 February-March 2019

February/March 2019 – No. 99

The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

GEOSPATIAL TOOLS Saving time, resources and lives

Official publication of

inside Eye in the sky An automated forest guardian

Are we there yet?

The road to a driverless future

Linking data Inside Google Dataset Search

THE ONE THAT STARTED IT ALL THE SX10 IS OPENING UP

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contents

February/March 2019 No.99

14

18 features 14 Q&A with Edie Bannerman We speak to one of the women behind a GIS intervention that has empowered tens of thousands of women and girls around the globe.

18 Are we there yet?

How far is Australia from the utopian vision of an automous driving future? Regulatory and technical challenges abound as road trials ramp up.

24 Fighting deforestation from above Building an automated guardian for the world’s forests with machine learning and satellites.

34 28 Weaving a web of data Linking datasets with standardised, structured metadata may remake discovering data on the web.

34 Quantifying the gulf A rigorous spatial analysis to understand the reality of access to disability services in Queensland.

regulars 4 7 10 37 38

Upfront, calendar Editorial News New products SSSI www.spatialsource.com.au  3

Upcoming Events 22 February: #BalanceforBetter Women In Spatial, Sydney, NSW https://sssi.org.au/events-awards/events/ balanceforbetter-women-in-spatial 26 February-3 April: Aerospace & Defence Expo and Australian International Airshow, Melbourne, Victoria www.airshow.com.au/ airshow2019/TRADE/index.asp

upfront

14-15 March: Sydney Build Expo 2019, Sydney, NSW www.sydneybuildexpo.com

Twisted solar system

L

ate 60s psychedelic proto-metal band Hawkwind may have been more celestially attuned than a 2019 audience might be inclined to accredit them.

Their sprawling, less-than-stellar 1975 release Warrior on the Edge of Time peaked with the meandering, spaced-out synth exploration Spiral Galaxy 28948.

New astronomical science out of Sydney’s Macquarie University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has produced a 3D map of 1,339 classical Cepheid variable stars (or ‘standard’ stars). These are stars around four to 20 times greater than our sun, up to 100,000 times as bright.

The resulting model demonstrates that our solar system’s disc of stars becomes increasingly twisted and warped as the distance from its centre increases. The results were published in Nature Astronomy in early February.

Xiaodian Chen, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and lead author of the article, said that using classical Cepheid stars to create the model meant they could measure distances with great accuracy to confirm the disc’s shape.

“It is notoriously difficult to determine distances from the Sun to parts of the Milky Way’s outer gas disc without having a clear idea of what that disc actually looks like,” he said.

“However, we recently published a new catalogue of well-behaved variable stars known as classical Cepheids, for which very accurate distances can be determined with an error of only three to five per cent.”

According to the researchers, work conducted over the last 50 years has indicated that the massive hydrogen clouds in the Milky Way are warped, but this new map shows that the warped nebulous disc also contains young stars — confirming that the torque of our solar system’s massive inner disc of stars causes the galaxy’s twisting spiral pattern.

4 position February/March 2019

From a colossal distance away, our nebula would resemble a thin disc of stars that orbits around its central region every few hundred million years, where the combined gravity of hundreds of billions of stars hold it all together.

The gravity of the far outer disc is far weaker, and the hydrogen atoms of the Milky Way’s gas disc are not confined to a single plane like the inner stars, and these factors combine to create the galaxy’s twisted, S-like appearance.

“We usually think of spiral galaxies as being quite flat, like Andromeda which you can easily see through a telescope,” said Professor Richard de Grijs, a co-author and astronomer from Macquarie University.

“Somewhat to our surprise, we found that in 3D, our collection of 1,339 Cepheid stars and the Milky Way’s gas disc follow each other closely. This offers new insights into the formation of our home galaxy,” he said.

“Perhaps more importantly, in the Milky Way’s outer regions, we found that the S-like stellar disc is warped in a progressively twisted spiral pattern.”

Whilst Hawkwind’s indulgent cosmic riffery on this theme contains no lyrics, I like to think that it presupposed this newly-proven truth. n

14-15 March: EuroGeo 2019, Paris, France www.eurogeography.eu 18-20 March: FMEdays 2019, Berlin, Germany www.fme-days.com 25-26 March: Future of Mining Australia 2019, Sydney, NSW https://australia.future-of-mining.com/ static/book-now 1-3 April: APAS2019, Pokolbin www.apas.org.au 2-4 April: Geospatial World Forum, Amsterdam, Netherlands https://geospatialworldforum.org 8-10 April: Locate Conference 2019, Melbourne, Victoria www.locateconference.com 8-10 April: Commercial UAV Expo Europe, Amsterdam, Netherlands www.expouav.com/europe 25-26 April: Energis conference, New York, USA https://energis.us 8 May: FME World Tour 2019, Sydney, NSW https://1spatial.com/au/event/fmeworld-tour-2019-sydney 9 May: FME World Tour 2019, Brisbane, Qld https://1spatial.com/au/ event/fme-world-tour-2019-brisbane 13 May: FME World Tour 2019, Melbourne, Victoria https://1spatial.com/ au/event/fme-world-tour-2019-melbourne 21-22 May: GEO Business 2019, London, United Kingdom www.GeoBusinessShow.com 14 August: AIMS national conference, Sydney, NSW www.aimsconference.com.au 15 August: 15th Southeast Asia Survey Congress, Darwin, NT https://seasc2019darwin.com.au

3D distribution of the classical Cepheid variable stars in the Milky Way’s warped disc (red and blue points) centred on the location of the Sun (shown as a large orange symbol).

17 September: Roads and Traffic Expo, Melbourne, Victoria www.terrapinn.com/roadsandtrafficexpo

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The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

Publisher Simon Cooper Editor Daniel Bishton dbishton@intermedia.com.au National Advertising Manager Jon Tkach jon@intermedia.com.au Graphic Designer Alyssa Coundouris Prepress Tony Willson Circulation/Subscriptions Chris Blacklock Production Jacqui Cooper Subscribe Position is available via subscription only.

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Website www.spatialsource.com.au Position is published six times a year, in February, April, June, August, October and December by Interpoint Events Pty Ltd. ABN: 9810 451 2469 Address: 41 Bridge Road, Glebe NSW 2037 Ph: +61 2 9660 2113 Fax: +61 2 9660 4419 Editorial inquiries should be sent to: dbishton@intermedia.com.au Advertising inquiries should be sent to: jon@intermedia.com.au Ph: +61 2 8586 6128 Reprints from Position are permitted only with the permission of the publisher. In all cases, reprints must be acknowledged as follows: ‘Reprinted with permission from Position Magazine’, and must include the author’s byline.

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the publisher.

Supported by

from the editor Hard out of the blocks

W

ith little hesitation, 2019 has already wound up to a fever pitch. As the Australian geospatial community anticipates the colossus of Locate19 less than two months away, trends of 2018 seem to have pitched up and redoubled.

Greater convergence and integration of disciplines at every turn, bolder penetration of spatial tech into mainstream business areas, ubiquitous applications of AI and Australia’s space industry blazing a capitalfuelled trail to orbit.

The proliferation of access to machine learning resources and vast imagery archives has democratised spatial intelligence, to some extent. In this issue, new contributor Rebekah Andrews profiles the non-profit project training a neural network to scan the world’s rainforests for evidence of agricultural overdevelopment, a new technique to hold unscrupulous actors to account in Southeast Asia, as the global market’s insatiable hunger for palm oil fuels the obliteration of ancient forests (page 24).

We ever-so-faintly illuminate an aspect of the gargantuan, endless task of making the world’s data connected and accessible with a behind-the-scenes look at how Google Dataset Search harnesses the power of semantic web standards (page 28).

A rigorous spatial analysis of disability services in Queensland has produced some damning data on accessibility, with considerable implications for the health and wellbeing of those in the state that rely on them (page 34).

Whether the thought of an automated, anonymous transport fleet replacing personal petrol guzzlers sparks joy or a nameless dread, there are great strides occurring in the move towards driverless vehicles. After a flood of investment and some nebulous-butimportant-sounding announcements in 2018, we examine where Australia’s really up to in the long haul towards an autonomous road transport future (page 18).

Finally, we sit down with Plan International’s Edie Bannerman, the architect of a relatively straightforward GIS data collection tool that has had a revolutionary role in giving a voice to women and girls around the world, and revealed some most shocking data (page 14).

Enjoy this 99th issue of Position.

April/May 2019 – Issue #100

NEXT ISSUE

The Locate19 super-issue • The fourth industrial revolution – IoT, Industry 4.0 and what it means for you • The new space race – investigating Australia’s extra-terrestrial investment • Best leveraging location – spatially empowered government and services • The shifting business of geospatial – leveraging latest tech and evolving business models Ad booking deadline: 12/03/2019 Ad material deadline: 15/03/2019 Publication date: 1/04/2019

www.spatialsource.com.au 7

news

GPS III Space Vehicle 01 is launched from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on December 23, 2018.

First GPS III satellite reaches orbit After extensive delays, the first next-generation GPS satellite was successfully launched on December 23, 2018, and has reached medium Earth orbit.

GPS III Space Vehicle 01 (GPS III SV01) was lofted aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 in

the last days of 2018, reaching its orbit on December 24.

Initially slated for a 2014 launch, GPS III SV01 is the first of ten GPS Block IIIA satellites, the latest generation of the US Air Force’s Global Positioning System.

The new spacecraft will support new civilian L1C and L2C navigation signals, along with a new M-code military signal and the L5 Safety of Life signal.

Each of these signals will be classed as fully operational

when broadcast by a full complement of 24 satellites, which is projected to be in 2021 for L2C; 2022 for M-code; 2024 for Safety of Life and the late 2020s for L1C. The final GPS Block IIIA launch is scheduled for Q2 2022.

TERN releases R plots package TERN has released a package for open source statistical analysis software R, enabling local analysis of TERN’s wealth of cloud-hosted data.

The newly released AusPlotsR package allows users to extract, prepare, visualise and analyse live data from over 600 live monitoring plots that TERN manages.

The package allows users to leverage R’s powerful inbuilt functionality to facilitate live manipulation of ecosystem surveillance data, including

physical sample barcode numbers to link with TERN’s Ecosystem Sample Library.

A library of functions in the package handle many of the most common preprocessing stages required to compile observations and greatly simplify creating multi-faceted data tables for analysis, including diversity indices, vegetation structure, classification, ordination, species accumulation, growth forms, tree basal area and fractional ground cover.

Position Partners nabs top prize at Topcon dealer conference Position Partners, exclusive distributors for Topcon in Australia, have received the top accolade for the construction industry at the recent Topcon Xperience dealer conference in San Antonio, Texas.

The Sydney-based company took out three awards at the December 2018 TopCon Xperience conference.

Position Partners was named ‘dealer of the

8 position February/March 2019

year 2017-2018’ in the construction category, also taking out ‘top 5 year-on-year sales growth’ and ‘top five excavator sales’.

“The Position Partners team has always exhibited strength and dedication in providing the most innovative technology and service to their customers,” said Jamie Williamson, Topcon executive VP and general manager of the construction and retail groups.

Locate19’s full program revealed The organisers of the geospatial behemoth that is Locate19 have released the full program for the April event.

The full program for Locate19 has been revealed — and it's absolutely jam-packed. It's time to start planning and doing your stretches, because there's more on than one can resonably manage, in six streams over three very full days.

The program kicks off at a relatively sedate pace on Monday, April 8 with the Market Day and activities to launch 'The Hub' — a central space for more intimate engagement and networking opportunities that builds on the Interaction Zone concept at Locate18.

Victorian Chief Engineer Collette Burke will help launch this new area with her session on Victoria's Digital Transformation, also appearing in a panel discussion cohosted by surveyor-general Craig Sandy. A special Locate session of Georabble will take place from 17:30 to 19:00 to close the opening day.

Tuesday opens the program in earnest, with a Welcome to Country ceremony, SIBA|GITA breakfast and plenary sessions rounding out the morning.

Firing on all cylinders after lunch, all six streams open concurrently. The 'Surveying in a digital world' track will cover everything from quality assurance with multibeam data, to maintaining an ethical standard of practice in an age of disruption.

Five simultaneous sessions in the 'Advanced agriculture' track will work through the themes as diverse mainstreaming of precision agriculture techniques, to reusing mining exploration data to assess land suitability, with public infrastructure, smart transport and infrastructure assets, utility management and urban planning and smart city tech all boasting similarly full schedules.

A space capability forum run by Phil Delaney of FrontierSI will run alongside these tracks until the evening, with the regional Asia-Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards dinner will fill the evening program from 7pm.

From there it's a race to the finish with a full day's programming across six streams until closing plenaries following afternoon tea. A spectrum of sessions exploring 'Geospatial technologies driving our digital future', the latest initiatives in 'Technology and data to protect our environment for future generations' round out a colossal program of presentations.

Explore the full program in detail at www.locateconference.com/2019/program.

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news Victoria launches digital asset infrastructure strategy Victorian Digital Asset Strategy (VDAS) mandates digital engineering and building information modelling across entire lifecycle for all infrastructure assets.

Victorian Chief Engineer Dr. Collette Burke and the Office of Projects Victoria have just released the strategic plan, which will be rolling out across all relevant government agencies in February.

At its base, the plan aims to engender a culture

of understanding of asset information's value of in government, at a time of gargantuan infrastructure spending for the state, with $78.9 billion of state capital projects slated to commence, be developed or delivered in 2019.

This involves development of asset information management regimes to efficiently create and maintain digital engineering data, attempting to maximise its use in government processes.

RIEGL opens local office, takes aim at Australia’s UAV sector RIEGL expanded their global presence in Australia and Oceania by opening a Queensland office focused primarily on the airborne/ UAV market.

The new office will provide direct RIEGL representation throughout Australia and New Zealand, offering full support to its existing RIEGL distributors in Australia,

C.R. Kennedy, and in New Zealand, Geospace.

Glenne Blyth recently moved over from distributor C.R. Kennedy to helm the new office.

“With a booming resource sector and rapid population growth fuelling a spike in infrastructure development and construction, spatial data consumption has never been greater,” Blyth said.

AI and automation to drive massive skills shift: report A Google-commissioned report has found that a wave of investment in skills is needed to adequately prepare Australia for increasingly automated future work.

The Future Skills report produced by economic strategy firm AlphaBeta examines projected changes to the Australian economy as a result of increasing automation and artificial intelligence, analysing 300

occupations, 2,000 work tasks and over 500 skills.

The researchers projected that by 2040, Australians will spend 33 percent more time on education and training across their lifetime, or an additional three hours per week, with a larger quotient of this time being dedicated in later life as workers re-skill for new positions, or up-skill to keep pace with changes to their own job descriptions.

GeoSLAM announces deep trade-in discount on ZEB scanners GeoSLAM is offering a massive reduction on the sticker price of their ZEB-REVO-RT and ZEBHORIZON units for a trade in of any other SLAM device — regardless of manufacturer.

The manufacturer of SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping) devices has

10 position February/March 2019

launched an audacious offer for users of the technology.

Under the upgrade campaign, GeoSLAM is offering £10,000 off the sticker price of its top-of-the-line ZEB-REVO-RT scanner and UAV-ready ZEB-HORIZON unit, accessible with the trade-

in of any other SLAM device.

The ZEB-HORIZON scanner has a range of 100 metres and can collect 300,000 points per second, and GeoSLAM claims its ZEB-REVO-RT can complete a 3D model in minutes due to its realtime data processing abilities.

GeoSLAM’s ZEBHORIZON scanner.

Planet acquires Boundless, to form government-focused arm Global satellite imagery provider Planet has acquired Boundless Spatial in a move aimed squarely at US government business.

The acquisition will extend and expand Planet’s relationships with commercial agricultural clients and the government, according to

material released late last year.

Planet will inherit Boundless’ government contracts, which include expertise and software already deployed within government.

The company says it will form a new subsidiary, Planet Federal, to focus on growing government business further.

High resolution bathymetry data trove released A raft of detailed new bathymetry datasets have recently been published on the AusSeabed Marine Discovery Portal.

Dr. Adam Lewis, head of the National Earth and Marine Observations branch, said that one of the new published datasets, 50 metre

Multibeam Bathymetry, contains all bathymetry data held by Geoscience Australia as of June 2018.

"The latest update to the 50 metre Multibeam Bathymetry dataset is a significant improvement. It has 34 per cent more coverage than the previous version released in

2012, and fewer artefactsfeatures that arise due to poor or missing data, he said.

"We've included data collected from more than 160 new surveys, carried out by multiple external providers around the country from 2012 to 2018 in areas that had not been previously mapped."

Locate 2019 | 8 – 10 April 2019 Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre ‘Where to next? Location, how we drive our digital future’

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news Goodnight and good luck, WorldView 4 DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-4 satellite has experienced a failure of its control moment gyroscope (CMG) system, preventing the satellite from acquiring high-resolution imagery.

The failure is preventing the satellite from maintaining accurate axis stability,

and DigitalGlobe said in a statement that WorldView-4 will likely not be recoverable.

The flagship satellite for imagery acquisition in DigitalGlobe’s constellation, WorldView-4 was launched in November 2016 for what was expected to be a 10-12 year mission. The craft was built

by Lockheed-Martin, with CMGs provided by Honeywell.

WorldView-4 joined WorldViews 1, 2 and 3, along with GeoEye-2 and Quickbird-1 in the DigitalGlobe constellation, offering an additional 680,000 square kilometres of 30-cm resolution imagery daily.

Artist’s rendition of WorldView-4. Image provided by DigitalGlobe.

Gerry Stanley joins Pitney Bowes’ global product team Gerry Stanley joins Pitney Bowes as senior product manager, stepping into the new role after 11 years at PSMA Australia.

Stanley was instrumental in developing PSMA Australia’s core product, Geoscape, a

vast built environment dataset that underpins Pitney Bowes’ GeoVision product, which adds detailed address, parcel and property data to the core Geoscape product.

Pitney Bowes says his appointment as senior

product manager for the Asia-Pacific region will see him shoulder responsibility for developing new address-centric data products in Australia, New Zealand and the region for the company.

WGIC, buildingSMART sign MOU on BIM standards, location data The World Geospatial Industry Council (WGIC) has signed an MOU with buildingSMART International (bSI) on best practices to drive uptake of BIM standards in concert with location-based technologies.

The memorandum of understanding states that both organisations will work towards a common initiative to demonstrate the value and widespread applicability of standards and geospatial information.

The initiative’s aim is to identify specific areas for collaboration and eventual integration of BIM and GIS standards, to assist understanding of jointly addressed best practices, standard

areas and projects, according to the WGIC. Sanjay Kumar, general secretary and CEO of the WGIC, said that the MOU would facilitate greater collaboration between the geospatial and AEC industries.

“We are delighted to be signing this MoU with the World Geospatial Industry Council to jointly focus our efforts on GIS and BIM integration. It is our aim that the community will benefit from sharing valuable data

that resides in multiple systems,” he said.

Richard Petrie, CEO of bSI, welcomed the association and new MOU. “The benefits for BIM deliverables will be realised by converging geo-coordinated data to improve digital workflows. This MoU is our commitment to open digital ways of working to help the industry deliver higher standards and projects through this collaborative process alongside the WGIC.”

POSITION’S NEWS ORIGINATES FROM Australia and New Zealand’s only site for surveying and spatial news.

Subscribe now for your FREE weekly newsletter at www.spatialsource.com.au 12 position February/March 2019

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feature

Q&A

with Edie Bannerman

Despite being one of the most developed countries in the world, Australia isn’t necessarily a safe place for women.

According to data collected by Plan International, one in three young women in Melbourne don’t feel safe after dark, and one in four would not use public transport on their own after dark.

Plan International developed a crowdsourced interactive map that they’ve rolled out in Melbourne, Sydney, Lima, Delhi, Madrid and Kampala — a project that has had an overwhelming response, and has yielded some alarming data. We sat down one of the women who helped design Free To Be, Edie Bannerman, to find out more.

14 position February/March 2019

Position: Edie, welcome. Could you sum up the Free To Be project’s methodology and aims, and how they fit in with Plan International’s strategic objectives as an organisation?

EB: Thanks for speaking with me today.

Plan International is a not-for-profit organisation working to advance the rights of children around the world — with a particular focus on young women and girls. And as any young woman will tell you, no matter where you are in the world, trying to move through city spaces can be a scary and dangerous prospect.

So we thought, ‘how can we document these experiences, how can we bring these stories of young women into the light when they are so often forgotten, and ultimately how can we change how women experience their cities?’ Out of those questions, Free To Be was born, a space where we allowed young women to share their stories of sexual violence and harassment on their streets in a safe, anonymous way.

Position: At face value, the results are arresting. The extent to which participating girls and women have reported feeling unsafe or being harassed versus positive reports is shocking — and this impression is deepened when reading through the reports. What conclusions have you been able to draw from the data?

EB: There are a few things that came through in the Unsafe in the City report that were alarming for us. The first is that no matter which city you are in, women are not safe to move freely, especially at night. We have created this illusion that because we live in Australia that somehow you will be treated with more respect as a woman — but of course we know now this this isn’t true. What we also found was that overwhelmingly young women felt harassment happened so often to them that they are simply ‘used to it’, and when they did report to authorities they felt that no action was taken. What this tells us is that we have a real cultural problem here — where women and girls

are seen as fundamentally of less value, that they are less deserving of a life without fear. Free To Be has shown us that we can’t wait any longer for change — because every moment we let this continue we allow these girls, who are victims of sexual violence and threats, to slip through the cracks as if they don’t matter. But they do matter — and we have to stand with them.

Position: My understanding is that this data has been contextualised and made available to planning departments, public transport authorities, local councils and police. Could you elaborate on this process — what is the intended outcome, and have you had a positive response to date? Have there been any notable firm commitments?

EB: The map was open for around six weeks, during which time we collected enough data to be able to understand what the female experience of these cities was.

All this data was analysed by the XYX Lab at Monash University and collated in the Unsafe in the City report that was released on International Day of the Girl in 2018. Since this release we have secured strong partnerships with police and public transport providers across two states now.

In fact in Melbourne, Metro Trains are developing new reporting mechanisms and looking into scaling up their training on gender sensitivity.

We hope that by making this data widely available to public and corporate bodies that we can start to move towards policies that reflect a gender-equal city.

Position: Could you outline the rationale for a map-based solution for this project — was that intrinsically bound to the intended outcome, or were other data collection and visualisation methodologies considered?

EB: What we really wanted to do with Free To Be was to show the world what a young woman’s experience of the city is - what it looks like through her eyes.

To do this we needed a visual mode, something interactive and accessible.

The crowdsourced map, developed by CrowdSpot, meant that users could see and understand their city in a whole new way. It also meant we could see hotspots for positive and negative experiences — so we could analyse what makes a space safe or unsafe. Now we know exactly where we are going wrong, why that space is unsafe — and how to fix it. So for us, a mapbased solution was the only way for Free To Be to make an impact.

Position: Could you describe any unexpected or particularly thorny challenges that you overcame in the planning and implementation of this project, if there were any?

EB: Perhaps the biggest challenge was to design a tool that actually

empowered girls — not one that created or exacerbated feelings of fear. But in truth the only way to make that happen was to get the input of young women themselves. So Plan International put together a team called the Youth Activist Series, a group of young women who worked on Free To Be from design right through to implementation. Free To Be was ultimately a project by young women for young women, and taught us perhaps the biggest lesson of all — we must include the voices of girls in decision making in order to see change.

Position: You’ll be presenting at the upcoming Locate19 conference in Melbourne. Are there any outcomes that you hope to achieve in your presentation and attendance at the event? Do you intend to have any future projects on the boil that incorporate location-based technologies or data?

EB: Violence against women is a problem that impacts every woman in our community in some way, and therefore it’s going to take our entire community to overcome it. We must continue to honour the courage of the women who have spoken out through Free To Be, and strive to create a city where they can exist free from fear. Every individual, company and organisation has a role to play in making gender equality a reality — and we hope to inspire them to join us in creating real change for girls and women, in whatever capacity that may be.

Edie Bannerman will give a plenary at Locate19, April 8-10 at the Melbourne Convention Centre. n www.spatialsource.com.au 15

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rom small house fires to multi-state natural disasters, the American Red Cross partners with hundreds of government authorities to understand where they’re needed, before dispatching a volunteer army of more than 40,000 to provide affected communities with clean water, safe shelter and meals.

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American Red Cross GIS solution The insights derived from the GIS solution are vital during large-scale national disaster relief operations, in everyday response to home fires, and in preparedness efforts for local communities throughout the United States.

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American Red Cross Senior Director, Brian Keenum met with Australian expert on GIS in emergency response, Mark Wallace, to share a behind-the-scenes look at the organisation's revolutionary approach to disaster response and recovery.

Wallace: When embarking on your digital transformation strategy, what role did you see for Geographic Information System (GIS) technology at American Red Cross?

Keenum: American Red Cross has been

using GIS technology tools to support its operations through creating maps of territories and providing situational awareness for around 20 years, but it was only around three years ago that the organisation made a concerted effort to digitally transform its GIS. We set out to create a truly dynamic and modern system that could inform all operations, by ensuring we were making the right decisions and providing absolute operational transparency to our various stakeholders.

We’ve been successful in achieving that and were humbled to receive the Esri President’s Award from Jack Dangermond.

But its not just a testament of the hard work the folks here have done. It’s a reflection of the hard-work of our extended

The American Red Cross is the world’s largest volunteer organisation.

network of partners – including government departments, community organisations and technology providers – who provide us with the additional data, content and capabilities we need to make a difference.

Wallace: Tell us about your flagship GIS solution, “RC View”…

Keenum: RC View is an enterprise

portal that provides broad access to GIS technology to people across our organisation and volunteer network; from directors to operations and volunteers.

It is our key platform for managing and analysing our own data, as well as data from other government agencies like National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

The insights the technology generates are absolutely critical to our operations on the ground, as well as for our key strategic decision-makers.

We run several programs that are centred around this technology, but from the perspective of a day-to-day basis, we use our GIS solution to provide mapping and analytics capabilities for our service delivery teams. This includes planning and executing service delivery during crises and in response to natural disasters.

It’s a critical system for understanding in real-time what the potential impact of a crisis may be, who will be affected, how we should respond – and how we can send resources to the right place as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Wallace: How has the technology strengthened your ability to mobilise your workforce during response and recovery?

Keenum: Mobile GIS – and being able to

capture and share data and analysis on the fly – has been a very powerful enabler for Red Cross. For example, at our evacuation shelters, we developed a program called RC Collect, which uses Survey 123 for ArcGIS to give our workers the ability to electronically check-in people and record their details, as they arrive. This feeds into our RC View system so we can record and look back on the data too. This gives us more visibility as to the demographics of those we are helping and reasons they may be staying at the shelter and unable to get back to their homes.

This was all paper-based previously, so the efficiencies gained have been huge.

Also just having that information available in a dynamic map-based view makes it easier to connect the dots. For example, if we can clearly see there is a large percentage of elderly people at a shelter, then we may need to organise geriatric services, certain medications or disability services. If there’s a significant number of kids present who are typically at school or daycare, then we need to arrange suitable entertainment and activities for them. The RC Collect app has already been a game changer – and down the track, we’re also investigating extending this capability to enable self check-in.

Wallace: From an efficiency perspective, how has the technology enabled Red Cross to work smarter?

Keenum: We can clearly see it’s taking

fewer people to perform our service delivery now we have the right technology in place and we are reacting a lot more quickly. We also have a detailed understanding of exactly what resources are required to perform a task. This of course translates to less wasted time and

money, because we can deploy the right number of people from the outset, instead of just deploying everyone and realising later that it was too many people.

The great thing with this technology, is we are constantly capturing insights into how we operate to ensure we continually optimise our operations.

For example, we are now collecting metrics into how long people may be spending in shelters and making inferences as to why this may be, which helps us determine strategies for getting them back on their feet sooner. These kinds of insights are so valuable – and only made possible by capturing and analysing this data as we receive it.

Wallace: Aside from response and recovery, how do you use GIS technology for preparedness and mitigation?

Keenum: We have a number of evolving

programs in place to support our preparedness activities. For example, there is our home fire campaign which involves us installing smoke alarms and helping families plan and respond to evacuation alerts. Our GIS solution provides critical insights into where we need to go to install alarms or run fire safety awareness programs. It does this by capturing and mapping our own home fire data records as to where we have previously installed alarms or responded to an incident, as well as data provided from other fire departments or community groups. Then we have social vulnerability indexes to identify areas most at risk of fire incidents.

By viewing and analysing this data through a geographic filter, we can clearly understand neighbourhoods that require education through awareness campaigns or even door knocking.

Beyond understanding where we need to install smoke alarms, it also helps our disaster action teams respond to every home fire in the US. Where appropriate we offer financial assistance to folks who can’t be in their homes due to damage and who need help getting back on their feet.

Esri president Jack Dangermond presenting the 2018 President’s Award for the innovative use of GIS to the American Red Cross, represented by Harvey Johnson and Brian Keenum at the Esri User Conference.

Wallace: You have thousands of volunteers and staff to manage – how do you ensure they gain value from your GIS? Keenum: We have 80,000 people in our core

‘RC View’ GIS portal, and 40,000 disaster relief volunteers who could each potentially access our GIS solution. The challenge is there are different use cases for each of these users – some people may just use “RC View” to visualise where key resources are located, whereas others use “RC Collect” for disaster assessment or shelter registrations.

Therefore, educating our teams and building capacity is a core priority.

Increasing user adoption is key to the success of the entire program. We’ve innovated to create this game-changing solution, but now it’s about building our capacity to use the system to its full potential.

To do this, we established the “RC View Academy” which is a program with three tiers for learning: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Beginner is very selfguided, such as educating yourself on how to get into the system and make a map.

The intermediate level includes more selfdevelopment as well as live online training to take them to the next level on the tools we use. And then there’s advanced, where we train the high performers. This is a lot more hands on – for example we recently sent 15 folks to Esri headquarters for an intensive 4-day course on Insights for ArcGIS and ArcGIS Pro. Fostering their advanced skills is critical to helping us engage our workforce and build innovation and strength.

To hear more about the technology behind the award-winning GIS solution paving the way in emergency response across the globe, visit esriaustralia.com.au/redcross n Information provided by Esri Australia. www.spatialsource.com.au 17

Are we there yet?

DANIEL BISHTON

I

t’s a chimeric promise of Utopian proportion or dystopian cast.

Seamless, personalised road transport that you barely need to interact with.

Your car an extension of your living room, commutes an expansion of leisure time or productive potential. Safe, silent, automatic vehicles interacting with their surrounds in the most efficient, stress-free manner possible. Bid farewell to road rage, frustration at the wheel gridlocked cities and the high likelihood of a violent death — the cars of the future won’t even have a driver’s seat, let alone a dashboard or gearstick.

With over 1,000 road deaths in Australia each year and 94 percent of all traffic incidents attributed to driver error, automated road transport seems to promise a radically safer future on the road, a point agreed upon by public health research and futurists alike. Cityscapes could be transformed by liberating the 30 percent of the urban environment currently locked up for parking space, freed for humans by the more efficient spatial needs of a smaller, intelligent transport fleet that does not need to remain proximate to its passengers at all times.

2017, allowing connected vehicles and smart road infrastructure to share data on the 5.9 GHz radio frequency band, a certification aligning with international standards in jursdictions motoring towards a driverless future.

2018 saw a wave of initiatives and attendant investment commitments across Austalia, as trials were extended, pilots announced — typically partnerships

Governments on the bandwagon

with a specific manufacturer to test an autonomous vehicle or smart piece of infrastructure in carefully controlled conditions or spaces.

Western Australia’s RAC announced a significant expansion of its automated vehicle program with the purchase of a $490,000 NAVYA Intellicar prototype, with designs for this to become a fleet to be trialled on public roads in the first

Back to reality, you say? Whether the above scenario strikes you as a nightmare or dreamscape, know this: Australian governments are getting ready. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) issued a Radiocommunications (Intelligent Transport Systems) Class Licence in late

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A national law would override and interface with all state discrepancies to provide a universally applicable legal environment that vehicle manufacturers and OEMs can reckon with.

half of this year, an expansion of its trial of the Intellibus. Bosch was the first manufacturer to receive a Victorian permit for automated vehicle tests on public roads in January, receiving a $2.3 million grant to test its developing driverless tech on high speed, rural public roads. Their autonomous platform is developed and manufactured by Bosch Australia, and based around a Tesla Model S. But perhaps the most significant milestone on the road towards a driverless reality was the announcement of a common legal framework to support automated vehicles, which made national headlines in May 2018.

Hard reset: who’s at the wheel?

Initial reporting of this announcement was fairly light on detail around the content of such a law, but its status as a turning point in the road automation agenda is significant. A patchwork of over 700 existing state and federal laws governing road use would need to be updated to support safe and accountable activity of autonomous vehicles, with the existing legal framework simply inadequate to cope with the complexities of a realm in which responsibility is not wholly attributable to a human driver.

A national framework demonstrates a commitment to a swift, blanket solution to fast-tracking this process.

Australia’s National Transport Commission (NTC) has been doing much of the hard yards in the push to prepare Australia’s regulatory environment for this new reality. Commencing on a

feature program commissioned by the Transport and Infrastructure Council in 2015, they have been researching, consulting and pushing out policy papers in pursuing their ‘roadmap to reform’ agenda. This initiative aims to achieve a safe operating environment for conditionally automated vehicles on Australian roads ‘before 2020’, and for highly and fully automated vehicles by 2020.

The NTC established the guidelines under which automated vehicle trials are operating, and in a 2017-18 review of Australian driving laws, found that the core of many of these legal issues is that Australian transport law assumes a human driver. Areas such as injury insurance for those involved in an accident with an automated vehicle, regulations around human supervisors for automated driving systems (ADS), vehicle compliance and enforcement methods were all found to need revision to create a legal environment that accounts for the risks and intricacies of this new legal reality.

One law to bind them all The proposed common framework is a one-size-fits all approach designed to address the raft of glaring issues in one fell swoop — a national law that would override and interface with all state discrepancies to provide a universally applicable legal environment that manufacturers and OEMs can reckon with. Indeed, it’s an approach they have been lobbying for internationally, and was the first recommendation in the NTC’s policy paper on driving laws — and now it’s an approach that all state and territory transport ministers have agreed to.

Sensor fusion: some of the common sensors utilised in Advanced Driving Assistant Systems (ADAS) and Automated Driving Sytems (ADS). Image: Texas Instruments.

Dr. Kirsten McKillop, manager of automated vehicles at the NTC, said that stakeholder feedback overwhelmingly supported a purpose-built national law as the most efficient approach to a fit-forpurpose framework, due to the extent of the changes required.

“We've had strong feedback during our consultation to not try and tinker with individual laws, although there will be a need for some consequential amendments etc. — that we should be approaching it as something entirely different that needs to be regulated to ensure safety. It is quite a different idea than a human driver,” she said.

“Most of the compliance for drivers at the moment is targeted at individual drivers, whereas with automated vehicles you're looking more at corporations. So

The RAC's plan to build a fleet of NAVYA Intellicars will build on its low-speed Intellibus trial, which has ferried over 14,000 people around the South Perth foreshore.

that makes a difference to what type of compliance mechanisms might be useful.”

An issue at the heart of a reform package for driving law is the distribution of responsibility for the act of ‘driving’ across a range of entities, which could now include corporations, proprietary software systems that manage a suite of systems to operate the vehicle and interface with humans to varying degrees, and humans that share responsibility for control of the vehicle under certain circumstances.

Following a fatal accident in March 2018, in which an Uber self-driving SUV killed a pedestrian whilst undergoing public road testing in Arizona, Australian state transport ministers agreed that regulation must stipulate conditions governing the fitness of human supervisors for their involvement in an automated driving system. Uber’s system could be categorised as within the controversial level three automation, in which a human observer is essentially the last line of defence, or fallback user, for avoiding obstacles or environmental challenges.

“We are looking at a purpose-built law for automated vehicles, because the tasks and responsibilities are in some ways quite different to the current rules that apply to humans,” Dr. McKillop said.

“Level three [automation] for example, with a fallback-ready user — that’s a new party that hasn't previously been regulated. Ministers decided in May 2018 that that fallback-ready user should be regulated so that they should have some duties to be sufficiently vigilant to take back control — be appropriately licensed, unintoxicated and so on.”

Dr. McKillop said that the NTC’s five overarching recommendations for the content of such a law are that it would www.spatialsource.com.au 19

feature firstly allow an automated driving system that has been approved under and continues to comply with the safety assurance system to perform the driving task. Secondly, a national law must ensure there is always a responsible legal entity for the driving task, thirdly clarify who that responsible entity is, fourthly set out any obligations on relevant entities, including the automated driving system entity, and users of automated vehicles and finally: to provide a regulatory framework with flexible compliance and enforcement options.

If it sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. The NTC is essentially driving the reform agenda to develop this law, striving to achieve consensus on their recommendations among transport ministers for the states and territories at bi-annual meetings of the Transport Infrastructure Council. At the next, to be held in May, the NTC will make recommendations on changes to insurance schemes to ensure that anyone involved in an accident with an autonomous vehicle is not worse off relative to the victim of a conventional road accident, along with recommendations on privacy, surveillance and government access to data.

The bleeding edge: safely certifying new tech There’s more to be considered than the piece-by-piece dissolution of the human driver in the eyes of the law, and the cyberpunk-esque ethical questions that scenario conjures up.

Highly autonomous road vehicles are extraordinarily complex and rapidly developing systems, composed of many sophisticated subsystems. Approving such products for use on public roads requires a comprehensive and rigorous overhaul of engineering and safety certification procedures.

The NTC is closely watching international developments, such as UN Mitsubishi Electric is investing in the development of a high-accuracy 3D map of Japan, aimed at all stakeholders in the automotive industry.

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Driving ingenuity: automotive applications are driving innovation in the LiDAR space. Baraja's scanner design eliminates moving parts for longevity in the demanding road transport environment.

working parties that are considering automated vehicles (including changes to international conventions), seeking to align regulatory approaches wherever possible — a wise and necessary move as Australia is likely to be a secondary market to the US and Europe for most manufacturers.

In November 2018, state transport ministers voted to include safety criteria within existing legislative mechanisms, such as the Road Vehicles Standards Act and the Australian Design Rules. Dr. McKillop said that manufacturers would need to self-certify against these criteria to ensure their systems can perform the driving task safely — allowing for technological agnosticism.

It’s important that the certification process remains non-specific on technical requirements, because the road to a driverless future is a dynamic and competitive one. Whilst most systems currently under development rely on the same base technologies — all with their own strengths, limitations and paths to maturity — their roles in the greater automated driving system vary, and time will tell which configuration and application of these capabilities will dominate and stabilise into an industrywide best practice, if any.

Nick Lansdale-Smith, vice president of business development at LiDAR manufacturer Baraja, is highly aware of

this. His firm has developed a novel scanner design, aimed squarely at the autonomous road vehicle market that eliminates mechanised and moving parts within the unit by utilising ‘prism-like’ optics.

“Regulation always follows innovation.

Autonomous vehicles are still very much a fledgling technology and will see continuing, rapid innovation for years to come. Regulation today should seek to nurture and support the development of self-driving vehicles safely, cognisant of the fact that the industry still has a long way to go,” he said.

“The biggest challenges relate to the fact that no one sensor modality is sufficient to crack the problem of how to build a safe, reliable autonomous vehicle. Finding the right combination of capabilities and interdependencies of these sensors is a significant challenge facing developers today.”

Secret recipes: a cocktail of technologies An array of scanners keep the driving system aware of the vehicle’s position relative to other vehicles, lane markings, obstacles and navigational waypoints.

On top of the array of electronic driving and navigational aids now standard on contemporary vehicles, vehicles on the road to driverless control are bristling with sensors: LiDAR, optical cameras, long- and short-range radar, ultrasound. Proprietary control systems manage and integrate all of these subsystems to keep the vehicle aware of and responsive to its surroundings.

This bristling suite of sensors provides relative positioning duties, which complement absolute positioning systems — high accuracy GNSS and inertial sensors — to allow an automated driving system to handle the myriad navigational, positioning and manoeuvring duties required in competent operation of a vehicle on public roads.

Rod Bryant, senior director of technology in u-blox’s positioning product centre, says that at this stage of development, the approach most manufacturers (OEMs) are taking is to

leverage the redundancy of this wealth of inputs, using the input of these systems to cross-check each other, and hence distribute risk across the subsystems.

“If the sensors were more closely integrated it would be far more difficult to assign risk to individual sensors. The penalty for this independence is reduced performance and therefore, we should expect an evolution towards tighter integration eventually,” he said. u-blox has developed a lane positioning system that works with a combination of high accuracy, dual band GNSS, an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and wheel sensors. Bryant said that closer integration of GNSS-based positioning with the landmark-based positioning systems should result in improved ultimate positioning performance by reducing effects of inertial drifts when combined with motion sensing, and calibrating out map registration issues.

Holes in the map Mitsubishi Electric, a manufacturer of LiDAR systems for automated driving applications, has a similar view of an absolute positioning scheme being central to an autonomous future on the road.

“Positioning correction based on landmark coordinates complements GNSS signals best when those signals are blocked, such as when in tunnels or below high buildings. Camera images and algorithms to acknowledge the target landmark with defined coordinates from those camera images are the key technology here,” a spokesperson said.

“The two are not complementary, they are mandatory. They are both to be used in combination to obtain the basic positioning data, in order to create a high definition 3D map.”

A wicked problem standing in the way of an autonomous driving future is the paucity of sufficiently detailed road maps to allow for autonomous navigation with highly accurate features, and the almost incalculable volume of work and investment required to create and maintain such a resource at scale.

Localised initiatives are taking off to cater for specific markets — such as the Dynamic Map Platform Co., Ltd, a commercial entity formed to create a common high precision, 3D base map for use by all entities in Japan's automotive market. DMP was established by Mitsubishi Electric, and designed for use by all automotive manufacturers.

As advanced as this technology is and despite the blistering pace of its development, we are still some way off of seeing driverless production cars

u-blox are developing extremely high-accuracy absolute positioning schemes for integration in automated driving systems.

Levels of automation Level zero: A human driver is responsible for all aspects of the driving task. Systems may warn or notify of hazards, but there is no intervention in vehicular control.

Level one: The first stage of automation, in which one aspect of the vehicle’s motion may be controlled automatically, such as speed or steering. Lane-keeping assistance and cruise control are level one technologies, despite traditional cruise control’s lack of monitoring of the car’s surroundings, and regulation of acceleration only.

Level two: The vehicle’s computing and mechanical systems can control the speed and steering inputs simultaneously, but the human driver remains ultimately responsible for the vehicle, and must take full control in an emergency.

Level three: The vehicle has responsibility for controlling speed

operating at scale on Australian roads.

A raft of regulatory challenges remain to be resolved in spite of the NTC’s ambitious agenda. Whilst some level four trials are kicking off under strict operating conditions, the advanced driving assistant systems (ADAS) of high-end production vehicles currently entering the market — present in new models from Audi, Mercedes — Tesla and Volvo, qualify as level two automation. OEMs working on level three and four concepts are hard at development, with no plans for production vehicles at this time.

The concept has not been subject to the court of wider Australian public opinion in any significant detail to date. Besides a handful of alarmist articles and some deeper discussion of the technological and ethical considerations from The Conversation and technology-focused

and steering, but also monitoring its surroundings and alerting a human observer to circumstances requiring intervention. Debate around the safety of this stage has led some manufacturers to bypass this phase of development.

Level four: Automated vehicles that require no human input, the automatic driving system has full responsibility for vehicular control and safe responses to all situations. Level four is distinguished only from Level five by limitations on the vehicles operating environment — such as a speed limit, or being unable to operate in certain weather conditions.

Level five: Fully automated vehicles with no operating restrictions whatsoever — able to safely and reliably operate anywhere, under all conditions. No level five vehicles currently exist.

outlets, discussion of the issues around it as a genuine reality have been missing from the mainstream. Polling in the US over the past few years has shown that typically over half respondents feel deeply uncomfortable with the idea of sharing the road with, or riding in autonomous vehicles, a sentiment exacerbated by unscrupulous behaviour of tech giants such as Uber and Tesla. Despite this, once we have a legal framework in place, there will be no further barriers to the integration of increasingly intelligent driving systems infiltrating production vehicles as rapidly as technological development allows.

Daniel Bishton is the editor of Position. For a deeper dive into how GNSS and landmark-based positioning systems may work in concert, stay tuned for a Q&A with Rod Bryant of u-blox in the next issue of Position. n www.spatialsource.com.au 21

sponsored feature

Consulting the Safe Work Reference.

Taylors Innovating for Safety First Safety First: Taylors are at the forefront of Safety training using groundbreaking Virtual Reality experiences for real safety results!

T

aylors are taking their culture of Safety First to the next level, creating ground breaking new Virtual Reality (VR) training. This innovative software combines the latest in geospatial technology and reality modelling to transform the way excavation and trench safety skills are communicated. The Taylors Trench Safety demonstration is an immersive VR experience that allows the trainee to learn and undertake all aspects of excavation and trench safety. In this extremely authentic environment, the user can gain real skills such as assessing control measures and identifying hazards, whilst also consulting the safe work reference.

Improving the training and provision of excavation and trench safety is a significant concern for the industry. In Victoria alone, there were three fatalities in 2018 as a result of trench related incidents. The challenge for Taylors was to design a solution that could provide

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Safety First – Assessing safety control measures and identifying hazards.

people with authentic and practical experience of this high-risk environment in a safe and meaningful way.

“We knew we needed to find a solution that would engage with people in an immersive way and we knew our expertise in VR and AR could help us to bridge that gap,” said Taylors' Managing Director Richard Cirillo.

Taylors have vast experience in the implementation of VR, AR and XR technologies. These solutions have been

implemented for their partners and clients to improve design outcomes, communicate with stakeholders and create immersive educational experiences.

It is this pool of expertise that has resulted in what Taylors believe is industry leading application of the technology.

VR provides a superior learning environment and allows team members to learn and relearn at their own pace. Users can develop and adapt through mistakes in a risk free and safe environment.

Realistic & immersive experience using the latest in VR, Reality Modelling and Photogrammetry.

“Making a mistake in a virtual training demonstration provides learning opportunities and reinforces skills acquisition," says Taylors’ HSEQ Manager, Matthew Yates. "But making errors in a live environment can lead to disastrous and even fatal consequences. The risk is just too high.”

Virtual Reality technologies are free from the limitations and risk associated with current training methods and provide an immersive and lifelike experience for the learner. Current representations of excavations, trenches and other high-risk site conditions utilise two dimensional drawings, photos and videos to demonstrate best practice. The drawback of these types of representations is that viewers are always positioned outside the representation, remaining spectators rather than participants.

Whilst traditional training aids such as photos and videos demonstrate the risks, the ways in which they are interpreted are open to variation. The benefit of Taylors’ VR solution is that it allows stakeholders to effectively step into realistic and accurate conditions. Users can walk around and assess safety control measures and identify hazards in the same way they would if they were on site.

VR offers extremely engaging and immersive experiences and provides real opportunities for learning and development. Research shows that such experiences lead to higher acquisition and retention rates than traditional methods. Rather than just textbook examples, at Taylors they now have the tools to immerse people in a simulated environment demonstrating situations and hazards they will encounter in the real world.

Mr. Yates says the ability to experience proper site conditions in such an interactive and immersive way is a game changer for safety training and risk management.

“Before, there was no way to provide practical training in trench and excavation safety without exposing

“We’re developing visualisation tools that allow our team to gain real skills through practical experience with no risk. It is groundbreaking, it is essential and most importantly it delivers Safety First” – Taylors’ Matthew Yates.

people to potential risks,” he says. “The visualisation tools that we’ve developed allow our team to gain real skills through practical experience with no risk. It is groundbreaking, it is essential and most importantly it delivers Safety First” Anthony Emmerson, Taylors’ General Manager for the Infrastructure Team, says the key difference between the software at Taylors and other virtual reality technologies is the accuracy and authenticity it can produce. “Taylors

Taylors VR Trench Safety Demonstration.

Experiencing real site conditions without risk.

incorporates the latest in geospatial technology, photogrammetry, reality capture and reality modelling to produce Digital Twins, creating simulations that are accurate recreations of real locations.

These realistic conditions bridge the gap between theory and practice. This is what it means to reproduce reality, and it has the potential to change the way the industry works”.

“In 10 years, the use of VR, AR and XR in the Urban Development and Infrastructure industries will be the norm for training, design and engagement," Mr. Emmerson says. "Once people see how effective it is and the tangible outcomes, it will become standard across the industry.

The sooner this technology is taken up, the better it will be for our industry and the people within it.”

The concept might sound radical, but if you look past the flash of VR, you see that benefits to businesses around cost, time and risk reduction are just too big to ignore. The way we as an industry train and protect our people is about to change.

Information provided by Taylors. n www.spatialsource.com.au 23

feature View of a palm oil plantation from above.

All photos by Ridhwan Siregar/WRI Indonesia

Fighting deforestation from above REBEKAH ANDREWS

S

outheast Asia is home to some of the largest, most diverse tropical forests in the world. It is also home to some of the oldest forests, dating back an estimated 70 million years. Many of these have been demolished at an alarming rate over the last few decades, with illegal logging and encroaching agricultural development proving difficult to surveil for local forest monitoring groups or international non-gvernmentorganisations (NGOs).

From the Harapan rainforest in Indonesia to the Banjaran Titiwangsaor Main Range in Malaysia, the rate and scope of deforestation was too great to be surveyed manually. Forest monitoring initiatives have begun to innovate, proposing new techniques and less labour-intensive methods of identifying deforestation over large swathes of land.

A 2018 study estimated that the region had lost 82,000 square kilometres of forest in the first 14 years of the century. Of this, another study published in Nature Climate Change, found that 12.8 percent of agricultural deforestation was due to plantations for pulp, forestry concessions accounted for 12.5 percent, just 2.1 percent was for mining concessions and 11 percent, in the years between 2000 and 2010, were due to industrial oil palm plantations.

A deeply rooted issue Global Forest Watch, a project run by the World Resources Institute, has been monitoring the world’s forests using satellite imagery and web mapping tools

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since 2014. Although palm oil is not the largest individual driver of regional deforestation, Global Forest Watch director Rachel Weisse said that its production yields shocking results locally.

“We see a lot of forests — primary forests — being cut down in places like Indonesia and Malaysia, in order to plant these plantations,” she said.

Indonesia and Malaysia together account for almost 85 percent of global palm oil production, with huge tracts of formerly thickly vegetated rainforest areas completely razed to support this output.

But the product’s nearly ubiquitous presence in consumer products, from chocolate and bread to shampoo, cosmetics and candles means there is a seemingly insatiable demand for palm oil.

In 2009, the World Bank said that population and consumption increases meant the world would require an additional 28 million tonnes each year by 2020, on top of the 69.6 million tons produced in 2017/18.

Creating an automated forest guardian In 2015, Global Forest Watch received funding from the Generation Foundation to develop a system for automatically identifying plantations in deforested areas using machine learning, the first prototype of its kind to use deep learning techniques on satellite imagery of the Southeast Asian forests.

According to Global Forest Watch, many palm oil companies in the region had zero deforestation commitments already, but Global Forest Watch manager

Oil palm fruits are loaded onto a truck for transport.

Mikaela Weisse said they made it their role to provide datasets on these companies, making sure they met their commitments.

“We’re seeing a lot more commitments being made by… oil palm companies that have gotten a lot of public pressure,” Ms Weisse said.

“It’s really important for being able to act upon it and hold different actors accountable.”

Global Forest Watch said they used over 3,000 manually labelled images to train the algorithm, a process that was slow and tedious. “[We] really just didn’t have the data and volume needed,” Ms Weisse said.

Collaborating with satellite imagery Orbital Insight, they fed their algorithm

thousands of satellite images, teaching it to recognise the patterns, textures, colours and shapes of palm oil plantations in a supervised training process. Orbital Insight provided the imagery and handled much of the labelling and storage of the imagery and working together, the slow process of labelling and supplying the images to feed into Orbital Insight’s convolutional neural network (CNN) was eventually completed.

Thousands of individually marked, ground-truthed satellite imagery samples from US-based imaging company Planet were fed to the network, and when the process was complete, it could recognise oil palm plantations by identifying patterns in colour, size and even texture. Convolutional neural networks see patterns similarly to how a brain makes conceptual connections, with very minimal pre-processing of source material required. They were designed to analyse visual materials, and to resemble the visual cortex of many animal brains. In other words, the CNN would learn the filters that would need to be classified manually in other algorithms, providing a major design advantage for Global Forest Watch’s application. By marking the imagery with areas that are oil palm plantations and areas that are not, the algorithm was able to recognise the characteristics automatically, recognising the shapes associated with a plantation, without a human having to input that information.

“Essentially it learns what those patterns are like, what kinds of factors are more indicative of an oil palm plantation versus not,” Ms Weisse said.

“The interesting thing about a convolutional neural networks is that it’s a bit of a black box, so you know it works, but in very abstract ways… we don’t know what the factors actually are,” she said.

Ms Weisse said near-daily highresolution satellite imagery updates from Planet, helped avoid training issues related to cloud cover.

“It’s resulted in being able to see almost all of our study areas in Southeast Asia without a problem, even though it is one of the cloudiest places in the world,” she said.

They would combine images from multiple days, ensuring their algorithm would always be able to analyse all the areas in the scope of their project, from Malaysia, Indonesia, Columbia and Cambodia.

Currently, GFW's project can only recognise plantations from satellite imagery, UAV-sourced imagery also poses additional challenges with varying angles and heights of captures.

“We would have to retrain it for each specific image source,” Ms Weisse said.

Planet images of Colombia; Orbital Insight human-marked ground truth for planted forest class in light green and not planted forest in blue; the prediction made by GFW’s final trained model.

Hurdles and new ways forward For all its success in automating a very difficult monitoring scheme, he project has had its share of challenges. The algorithm persistently confused different kinds of plantations, and had trouble consistently recognising plantations in the earlier stages of their development.

Ms Weisse said that in Columbia in particular, they were picking up a lot of banana production areas in their results.

“We’ve talked a bit about if there are other sources of satellite imagery,” Ms Weisse said, but indicated that they hadn’t yet found a solution to this issue.

The tool is nowhere near a realtime response mechanism, either.

The deforestation processes that the model can recognise represent years of development before the algorithm can identify it. This means that the tool is not yet responsive enough to stop

Land use results for a region in Borneo. Blue represents natural forest class, green represents planted forest class and orange represents urban class.

deforestation as it occurs, but this could potentially be a future application — it fulfils its stated objective of delivering supply chain transparency by being able to hold actors accountable. Ms Weisse said in terms of detecting younger plantations, the team would potentially look into more detailed training regimes to help the network recognise plantations at earlier growth stages.

Ms Weisse said that in spite of these issues, the resource they'd developed would make monitoring the forests for palm oil plantations much easier, facilitating identification with the bare minimum of human input.

Deep learning had been upreviously for all kinds of technologies, from facial recognition to language translation, but Ms Weisse said theirs was the first to use it to combat deforestation caused by palm oil production, a massive problem for Southeast Asia.

Ms Weisse said that the project was a landmark in terms of the use of technology to tackle one key aspect of the multifaceted issue of excessive deforestation due to overdevelopment of palm oil, with plans to expand into Papua New Guinea, Liberia, Guatemala and Honduras.

“Our goal really is to use spatial data, especially from satellites to do better monitoring of the world’s forests,” she said.

Rebekah Andrews is a Melbourne-based science and technology journalist. n www.spatialsource.com.au 25

sponsored feature

Verde: Next-generation agricultural intelligence Airbus’ Benjamin Mallavan and Tim Neale of Australian ag-tech company DataFarming give farmers the lowdown on harnessing satellite imagery and machine learning to maximise yields.

Verde is the next step in the precision agriculture revolution; bringing more information, more often, for better farm practices.

Airbus has been helping Farmers get more out of their fields with high resolution imagery and analytics for in field solutions for over 10 years. Today, Airbus is offering its expertise in satellite imagery and crop analytics to agricultural advisors, agronomists and online agricultural service providers; providing a constantly up-to-date reference layer for premium crop analytics, served as an API. This product, called Verde, was launched on Feb 5th this year.

DataFarming is an Australian ag-tech company created in July 2017 by leading Australian Precision Ag (PA) specialists, Tim and Peta Neale. Its core purpose is to remove the barriers to adoption of PA and digital data use. DataFarming provides new and innovative methods for delivering products and services to farmers and agronomists as simple, automated, low cost products with direct on ground actionable solutions.

In fact, more than 4,000,000ha of NDVI imagery has been processed to a field level, covering 7,500 farms.

26 position February/March 2019

Question: Satellites seem to be very common now – how much data is actually available?

Benjamin Mallavan, Airbus: Satellite imagery is far more available through programs like Sentinel and Landsat providing free and regular global coverage of the fields. The challenge today is to complement these sources with extra revisit rate or higher resolution, depending on the use case – both of which Airbus can bring to the table.

But availability is also a matter of real usability. With Verde, the entire image is usable and high quality: clouds, cloud shadows and haze are removed.

Additionally, Airbus only provides the relevant pixels: each image is pre-clipped to the field boundaries, so that all the information is actionable in contrast to previous agricultural service offerings.

Q: In the past, it’s been really hard to purchase satellite data on a paddock by paddock basis at a reasonable cost – what’s being done to alleviate this problem?

BM: The need to commit to a minimum order size hindered the up-take of satellite imagery in precision agriculture where

Benjamin Mallavan is Head of Agronomy for Airbus Defence and Space.

Tim Neale is Managing Director at DataFarming.

fields may be very small and scattered over a large area. Moreover, the production systems behind the images were not able to deal with areas of interest (AOI) below a few km². Today, Airbus is speculatively collecting AOIs over significant production landscapes so archive imagery is available and regularly refreshed. Our production system has also evolved to deal with thousands of very small surfaces in parallel. Digitalisation has opened the direct interaction between machines: it is now easy for a portal provider to order automatically thousands of small field images and upload them in a few minutes – without any human intervention.

LEFT: Field by field in season analysis allowing for higher quality, more frequent intelligence resulting in smarter, faster decisions.

Q: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is very handy for general crop assessment but sometimes we get saturation in crops like rice, cotton, and sugarcane. Why is this, and how does Verde overcome this problem?

Tim Neale, DataFarming: NDVI is great because it is easy to compute, and it does not require knowledge of the crop.

It provides a good overview of the variability of plant development within the field i.e. where the quantity of live green vegetation is high and where it is low.

However, NDVI has some limitations.

It presents only a relative evaluation of the differences in vegetation development, and approaches saturation when canopy closure is reached. As a result, access to absolute information with NDVI requires calibrating the model with ground measurements that should be synchronized with the image acquisitions.

This can be a costly exercise.

An alternative and more advanced method exists. It is called biophysical parameter extraction, and that is the one used behind Verde. Although it requires sophisticated, complex processing algorithms, it features analytics that are highly correlated to biomass and the nitrogen nutrition, such as green cover fraction (fCover), leaf area index (LAI), or chlorophyll content. Verde’s analytics are robust and independent from the image sensor, and do not saturate even late in the growth cycle. These parameters can then be used to follow crop evolution and compare situations at two different points in time with no bias and free of ground measurement. They open the gate to more advanced farming diagnosis and recommendation. Verde’s fCover works for any crop, while Verde’s LAI and Chlorophyll Content analytics are currently available for wheat, barley, corn, soybean, rapeseed, potatoes, cotton, sugar beet, sugarcane, almonds, rice, alfalfa, grass – and more crops are regularly added to this list.

Q: I want actual crop parameters rather than just an image; how does Verde achieve this?

BM: Our approach relies on reflectance modelling to calculate key biophysical parameters which are physically describing vegetation development / activity. They are based on a chain of models: • A vegetation model, to integrate the canopy architecture, and the foliage, • A model of the soil optical properties, • A atmospheric model, to understand the atmospheric conditions and the properties of the atmospheric components • A model of the sensor and of its spectral bands, • A model of the topography, to estimate the slope and the angle of illumination.

And that works regardless of the satellite image used to perform the work.

Q: Nitrogen fertiliser is often the biggest input cost we have in farming. How can we manage this better?

TN: Indeed, nitrogen is very expensive but it is a key contributor to yield. If you do

not apply enough, the plant is stressed; resulting in a direct consequence on the amount of production. If you apply too much, you waste resources, risk environmental impact, and potentially grow too much bulk.

With LAI and Chlorophyll, you can get a reliable estimation of the biomass and actual N-uptake by the crop. As these analytics are describing physical properties of the plant, you can combine them with crop models and local information such as soil, weather, and moisture in order to assess the exact nitrogen need in every point of the field.

However, all this needs to be put into perspective of the farmer. What their previous nitrogen applications and their daily farming practices are; in order to make sure the advice of nitrogen application comes at the perfect point of time. Advice should also integrate their objectives and targets: what yield, what quality, and what outcome is envisioned for this field? This last step is finally the one allowing closure of the loop: from nitrogen uptake calculation, then nitrogen need assessment, and finally nitrogen prescription map – directly usable by the farmer and aligned with their strategy and the status of the field at a given time.

For more information on Verde, contact Jonah Williams with Airbus Defence and Space on 0418 217 576 or at jonah.williams@airbus.com. n Information provided by Airbus Defence and Space.

Tim Neale and agronomist Mike Jones using DataFarming to look at crop variability.

www.spatialsource.com.au 27

feature

Weaving

a web of data

DARREN MOTTOLINI, DR IVANA IVÁNOVÁ, TRISTAN REED

Linking datasets with structured metadata

O

rganising the world’s information is a formidable task and for those that manage data, the task of publishing and ensuring data records remain current and useful is never-ending.

In late 2018, Google launched a new online search engine specifically aimed at solving the challenge of finding and accessing the right dataset among the ever growing and increasingly fragmented array of online dataset repositories. A formidable undertaking indeed.

We have all experienced not being able to find the right data for our needs.

The time spent, only to find that you must further process the data to make it fit-for-purpose, costs business and government alike. Often just knowing the right person shortcuts all the effort by allowing you to get your hands on the right data up front without having to go into a dormant data repository, with outdated metadata that includes a disclaimer to beware of the data

28 position February/March 2019

inconsistencies. The cost of finding the right dataset and the effort required to determine its usefulness is a cost we all bear, noted by NBN Co, who purchased the Geocoded National Address File (GNAF) only to find it did not specifically meet their engineering needs, even though it did meet other needs.

The Google approach Google Dataset Search applies the same principles as Google Search (which are also used for Google Scholar). As long as the right structure of metadata tags is included in the data repositories, it will index the metadata for discovery.

The purpose of Google Dataset Search is to improve the discovery of datasets from sectors such as life sciences, social sciences, civics and government. Google plans to do this by ensuring publishers provide structured metadata, this means each dataset must include support information describing the dataset. The idea of using structured metadata to allow machine to machine linkage is an area of research FrontierSI (formerly

the CRC for Spatial Information) has been engaged in for the past seven years. While Google Dataset Search is a great advancement, the reality is that this new application is only dipping into the possibilities of what can be achieved through structured metadata and machine linkage. While still early, Google’s work is indirectly demonstrating that the research undertaken by FrontierSI has practical merit, while recognising there is still more work to be done. Searching for the right dataset through smarter use of structured metadata is only the low hanging fruit in optimising machine to machine links.

Improving search so that users can use ‘natural language’ phrases such as ‘what is the grain production output within the wheatbelt’ should not only get you to the right dataset, but in the future provide you the right answer. We see this as the next level of research that Australia is well-positioned to lead. Let’s explore what is standing in our way — to not only improve what datasets we search for but help generate the answers we need.

Structured metadata?

You may be asking yourself: ‘Don’t we already have metadata standards?’

Searching for spatial datasets in the geoinformation domain relies on the existence of dedicated catalogues (including metadata catalogues, geoportals or clearinghouses) and complex, standardscompliant metadata, such as ISO 19115.

Metadata is a structured collection of information fully describing the spatial resource, and includes information about the creator of the dataset, its spatial and temporal reference system, content, quality and constraints on its use. The ISO standard recommends a minimal metadata set which should serve for data discovery and identification, yet despite having a complex and exhaustive metadata standard, there are persistent and well-known problems with spatial data discovery.

Spatial metadata is scarce or, if available, not well maintained, which is caused by two major problems: • First, the use of standards is not mandatory, and even if mandated (e.g. by national or corporate Spatial Data Infrastructure ‘SDI’ policy), the standard does not specify a minimum metadata requirement. As such, it is frequently up to data producers to decide how much metadata and what information to provide.

• Second, metadata is provided in specialised jargon, understandable only by geo-information professionals and often only those from the same specialised area as the producer.

To add further difficulty, searching for spatial resources relies on prior knowledge of these dedicated catalogues and where they can be accessed. Currently, attempting to use mainstream search engines requires an intricate and advanced knowledge of crafting search query strings to guide the search engine to specified data catalogue location. Once there the search engine further needs to interact with the data catalogues system (such as using a OGC Catalogue Web Service request: http://www.opengeospatial.org/

Dr Ivana Ivánová.

standards/cat) to identify the right dataset based on the original query string.

There were prior attempts to harmonise search for spatial datasets with dedicated catalogues using mainstream search engines – one such example is OpenSearch for GEO (http:// www.opengeospatial.org/standards/ opensearchgeo), however, search for the right dataset that is fit for the user’s desired purpose continues to be a challenge in the geospatial domain.

An initiative within INSPIRE, the European SDI, to align geospatial metadata standards with the web Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT: https:// joinup.ec.europa.eu/release/geodcatap-v10) demonstrates the desire to expose currently ‘invisible’ data repositories to the

Darren Mottolini.

Tristan Reed.

Understanding that in a cadastre, a property may also be called a lot, a land parcel, a land boundary, a property boundary, a title boundary, or several other possible terms — these additional descriptions become important for a search engine. web and aligns with recent developments in mainstream search engines, such as Google Dataset Search.

Google has recommended the use of RDF models and DCAT vocabularies to setup and design structured metadata for published data, but what does this mean?

RDF stands for “Resource Description Framework”, a metadata model used as a general method for expressing conceptual descriptions or modelling of information

that is implemented in web resources. It is a knowledge management technique that is founded on the idea of describing resources in the form of a triple – consisting of a subject, predicate and object. In the example below, the subject is a property, the predicate expresses the relationship “isLocatedOn”, the object in this case being a street. The expression would be “a property is located on a street” - subject, predicate, object.

Figure 1. Simple RDF expression demonstrating an inferred link.

www.spatialsource.com.au 29

feature

Figure 2. Represented Graph Data Model.

DCAT is an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogues published on the Web. DCAT does not make any assumptions about the format of the datasets contained within a catalogue but provides a standardised method of expressing the structure of a data catalogue and the metadata records of datasets within it.

How does it all work?

A collection of RDF statements intrinsically represents a directional graph data model that is suited to generating knowledge, from understanding how data is linked, while using machine inference to ‘fill in the gaps’. Using the concept of a mining haulage machine and the interlinked assets and components related to build such a machine, you can quickly map a graph data model by linking statements (see Figure 2).

Once linked, using data analytics software (such as Apache Hadoop) can then infer other linkages without having to hard code them into applications or build new look up tables. However, in practice, RDF data is often stored in normal relational databases or native representations providing a mechanism for publishers to start building their own RDF statements and publishing these.

So why structure metadata this way?

When searching for datasets to meet the requirements of a solution, understanding that, for example: in a cadastre, a property may also be called a lot, a land parcel, a land boundary, a property boundary, a title boundary, or several

30 position February/March 2019

other possible terms, these additional descriptions become important for a search engine. However, in most cases search engines do not consider the fact that one ‘thing’ may be called many different things by other groups of people.

As such, if we were to describe a dataset as containing information on ‘tree canopy’ a user querying the search engine with a more general term such as ‘vegetation’ would not find the dataset and so would not be aware of a dataset that may meet the requirements of their solution as it was described using other terms.

Google Dataset Search is currently a leader in this regard. For example, querying ‘bore hole’ and ‘borehole’ yield effectively the same results. This is in contrast with other dataset search engines in use, such as CKAN, which ignores all records containing ‘borehole’ if the search query is ‘bore hole’ and vice-versa.

Through expressing metadata in a structured RDF format, vocabularies can be linked to elements of the metadata to ‘expand’ or broaden the content. For example, existing or expert-generated vocabularies describing alternative representations for ‘bore hole’, ‘cadastre’ or ‘tree canopy’ could be used to automatically expand the keywords listed in the metadata records for the cases discussed above.

Spatial data also intrinsically contains extra context, be it implied through the geographic extent of where the spatial data itself is or the geographic extent to what the data covers which may be, specifically described in a metadata record. By applying the principles of RDF ‘triples’ to create context in the

published metadata, dataset search engine results can be tailored for the end user by looking at the spatial relevance or suitability of a dataset.

One example would be describing a dataset’s extent as being ‘Northam’, a town in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia. Using RDF compliant vocabularies, a user can query a search engine with a phrase such as ‘in the Wheatbelt’ and find said dataset. As such, a user looking to compare data from a set of related geographic areas only needs a single search query, rather than many as is currently required.

The Spatial Infrastructures program of FrontierSI has been at the forefront of research in this area for the past several years and new applications, such as Google Dataset Search show ongoing promise that we are on the right path. For now, FrontierSI is continuing to improve how spatial metadata can better leverage the ‘web of data’, while supporting Australian data publishers to ready their data for Google Dataset Search is part of the ongoing process.

Darren Mottolini is a senior consultant at GHD, previously with FrontierSI, working with partners to coordinate and apply new thinking to data modelling and automation of complex processes.

Ivana Ivánová works as senior lecturer in Spatial Sciences at Curtin University and is a research fellow at FrontierSI. Tristan Reed is a researcher who investigates using new techniques to solve complex spatial analysis problems, currently working for the Planning and Transport Research Centre. n

The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information 9 – No. 98 anuary 201

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Quantifying the gulf Using spatial methods to identify disability service gaps in Queensland ALI LAKHANI

A

ustralia’s urban/rural divide has implications far beyond cultural attitudes and turns of phrase. A significant health disparity yawns between Australians living in remote regions, and those that dwell in major cities. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2017 report Rural and Remote Health found that compared to people living in major cities, people living in remote and very remote Australia tend to experience higher rates of disease and injury — including diabetes and stroke — and live shorter lives. For example, in 2015, people residing in remote and very remote regions of Australia were 2.3 times more likely to die from diabetes compared to people residing in major cities.

While the health disparities faced by people in remote regions are due to a variety of factors, the lack of proximately available health services is notable amongst these. In this regard, findings from a 2017

Dr. Ali Lakhani.

34 position February/March 2019

Australian Bureau of Statistics report concluded that over a 12-month period, people in major cities were more likely to have visited a general practitioner and dentist compared to those living in remote regions. The lack of access and use of health services for people in remote parts of Australia is problematic, as this may adversely impact quality of life in these regions and result in hospital admissions which could have been avoided.

Access to health services for people with disability Arguably, for people with disability and/or injury, access to health services can have a greater impact on health and wellbeing outcomes compared to those without disability and/or injury. In particular, access to disability-specific support services is essential to promote the health and wellbeing, as well as community participation outcomes for people with disability. In a 2012 study, Worobey and colleagues identified several consequences resulting from wheelchair breakdown including being stranded, missing medical appointments and missing school or work.

In this regard, as expected, the proximate availability of aids, equipment and disability support services may impact the ability for someone using a mobility aid to receive timely service and as a result, exacerbate adverse consequences.

Researchers from The Hopkins Centre, Menzies Health Institute Queensland at Griffith University have been conducting research investigating the impact of spatial

environments on the health and wellbeing of people who have experienced a traumatic injury. This work is being done to inform the launch of the new Epidoros-V2 platform, which is intended to engage GIS and non-GIS experts with relevant spatial data to address research questions pertaining to disability and rehabilitation.

In preparation for the launch, multiple studies running concurrently have investigated the geographic dispersion of disability support services in relation to people with disability in Queensland.

Queensland: the need for further research To date, the geographic dispersion of disability services in Queensland's remote regions has yet to be investigated. Such research is imperative to establish which disability support types are least available based on remoteness, and further, where investment is most urgently needed.

Additionally, given the roll-out of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and National Injury Insurance Scheme (NIIS) within Queensland, such an analysis can guide investment decisions and ultimately impact the health and wellbeing of people with disability and/or injury in diverse regions within the state.

With this in mind, a spatial analysis study was conducted to ascertain the travel time to diverse disability services for localities within different regional classifications in Queensland, and investigate the difference in travel time for localities to services based on remoteness.

feature Data sources and analysis procedures Three datasets from two sources were used to undertake this research. Localities within Queensland that included over 200 residents were identified from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Urban Centre and Locality (UCL) Classification, while remoteness levels were identified from the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) 2016 Remoteness Structure. The ASGS 2016 Remoteness Structure is a five tier structure which classifies regions as being (in order from least to most remote): major cities in Australia, inner regional Australia, outer regional Australia, remote Australia, and very remote Australia. Geocoded data for Disability Services offered in Queensland were obtained from the Health Direct National Health Services Directory.

Disability Services across diverse domains were aggregated into three overarching categories: aids and equipment, support and advocacy, and information and referral.

Data analysis was undertaken sequentially. Initially the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) software ArcMap 10.4.1 was used, and later IBM’s statistical analysis software SPSS was employed. Initially, both the ASGS 2016 Remoteness Structure, and the UCL Classification shapefile were imported into ArcMap. After, using the ‘Feature to Point’ function, a centroid was produced which represented the geographical centre of each UCL polygon. Subsequently, a spatial join was undertaken so that each locality was delegated the relevant ASGS 2016 Remoteness Structure attribute (i.e. major city in Australia, inner regional Australia etc.). Then, disability services aligned with each of the disability service types were imported into ArcMap, and the travel time from localities to each of these services established via three separate ‘Origin Cost Destination Matrix’ analyses. Each analysis was progressed so that the closest service was considered, and that travel time was established via driving an automobile, on publically available roads. Finally, a series of spatial joins were conducted so that the travel times to each service type were delegated to the relevant locality.

Once analyses within ArcMap 10.4.1 was complete, the UCL attribute table which included the remoteness level aligned with each locality and the travel time to each service type was exported into a SPSS database file. Then within SPSS, descriptive statistics were calculated so that the mean travel time to each disability service type for localities within each remoteness level were produced.

Furthermore a series of non-parametric tests were conducted. Specifically, a series

Travel time to aids and equipment services, in minutes.

of inferential analyses using the KruskalWallis test were conducted to ascertain if there was a difference in travel time to the three support service types across localities within the five considered remoteness categories.

Findings: travel times and underserviced regions Findings conclude that mean travel times from localities to each disability service type increased based on remoteness level.

The mean travel time to each disability service type was shortest for localities within the regional classification ‘major cities of Australia’ while longest for localities within the regional classification ‘very remote Australia’. Furthermore, thematic maps 1-3 illustrate the travel time in minutes for localities within each regional classification to each service type. Within each figure, localities are represented by coloured circles, and travel time in minutes to each service type clarified by the size of the circle.

Findings also conclude that travel times to all disability service types — aids and equipment, information and referral, and support and advocacy — for localities within very remote and remote Australia were significantly higher than for localities within major cities in Australia and inner regional Australia.

For example the mean travel time to the nearest aids and equipment provider for Gununa, a locality within very remote Queensland, was approximately 1,532 minutes compared to 30 minutes for Springbrook, a locality in inner regional Queensland. In relation to mean travel times, the mean travel time to aids and equipment, information and referral, and support and advocacy services for localities within very remote Queensland were approximately 359 minutes, 252 minutes, and 731 minutes respectively, while the mean travel time to the same services for localities within major cities in Queensland were approximately 12 minutes, 11 minutes, and 15 minutes. www.spatialsource.com.au 35

feature Implications for providers, government, and end users The findings from this research confirms the notion that localities within remote and very remote regions of Australia lack the proximate availability of health and social services which are essential to promote favourable health and wellbeing outcomes. In this regard, the findings confirm those presented in a Coffee et al.

(2012) article. Specifically, their findings confirmed that rural and remote regions of Australia had poorer access to cardiac affiliated health services, a finding which we have also confirmed here, in relation to disability-specific services.

The findings from this research have considerable implications for disability specific health and social service providers, government, and people with disability. In relation to health and social service providers, the paucity of services within remote Australia means that innovative methods to engage with people in these regions are necessary.

In this regard, it may be worthwhile for such providers to use mobile and digital outreach approaches to engage with potential clients/members in rural and remote Australia. Furthermore, outreach should be undertaken to ascertain the specific contextual factors which are being faced by people with disability in these regions, such outreach will ensure that services and programs offered address the distinct needs to these groups.

It is essential that spatial research underpins decisions made by disabilityspecific health and social service providers. In this regard, researchers from The Hopkins Centre have partnered with Spinal Life Australia — an end user representative support and advocacy organisation for people with spinal cord injury — to conduct a range of studies to clarify the geographic dispersion of health and social services in relation to people with spinal cord injury in outer regional, remote and very remote Australia. Findings from research to date have informed the programs and services offered by Spinal Life Australia.

In particular, spatial research comparable to that presented in this article has supported their development of service centres in Rockhampton, Toowoomba, and Cairns.

For government, with the roll-out of the NIIS Queensland, and NDIS, the lack of disability-specific health and social services available within remote Queensland means that funding packages offered to people within these regions need to account for the unique health and social service costs (ie. travel costs) aligned with offering services in remote settings. Most recently,

36 position February/March 2019

Spinal Life Australia member Christa Schweizer enjoys the South Bank Parklands in Brisbane.

perspectives from NSW service providers detailed in a 2017 article by Llina Flynn clarified that the unique costs of offering health and social support to people with disability in rural and remote regions are not adequately addressed by individual NDIS budgets, and as a result, in some instances, people with disability and service organisations are carrying the burden of these costs. This outcome was also identified as an unintended consequence of self-directed policies for people with disability within a 2018 systematic review undertaken by the author and colleagues and published in the Journal Health and Social Care in the Community.

Finally, for people with disability within rural and remote Australia, there is potential that the lack of disability-specific health services available are adversely impacting their health and wellbeing.

People in these regions may be receiving disability support which is not adequate.

In this regard, Barr and colleagues' 2018 systematic review highlighted that services provided to young people with hearing loss in remote settings may be inferior. Furthermore, they clarified that service use amongst the group is compromised. These findings may also be applicable for people with disability within the remote and very remote localities considered within this study.

Finally, this study has limitations which are also important to consider. The disability services provided by Health Direct’s, National Health Service Directory are exhaustive, however may not reflect the entirety of disability specific services available in Queensland. Furthermore, while the proximate availability of disability services is important, it is also important to consider that people in remote areas of Queensland may be able to liaise with relevant disability support

organisations via phone or online.

Consequently, increased travel time is not indicative of a complete lack of access for people within these localities.

Next steps: Spatial methodologies essential to clarify underserviced regions in Australia This study clarified that people with disability within remote and very remote Australia experience significantly higher travel times to disability services than people with disability within major cities of Australia and inner regional Australia.

The study is seminal as it is amongst the first to utilise spatial methods to ascertain the geographic dispersion of disability services in relation to people with disability in Queensland. It is important that future research utilise spatial methods to establish the geographic proximity of disability specific support services in relation to localities within areas with a significantly high number or proportion of people with disability. Furthermore, it is also important to investigate the impact of long travel times on disability service use, and subsequent health and wellbeing outcomes amongst people with disability.

The Hopkins Centre: Research for Rehabilitation and Resilience (http://www. hopkinscentre.edu.au/) is a joint initiative of Griffith University and the Division of Rehabilitation, Metro South Hospital and Health Service in partnership with the Motor Accident Insurance Commission (MAIC), Synapse, Spinal Life Australia, and Health Consumers Queensland. Dr Ali Lakhani is a MAIC Research Fellow and the Promoting Positive Environments Research Lead. He can be contacted at a.lakhani@griffith.edu.au and a Story Map underpinning this research is available at www.spatialhealthresearch.com. n

new products

Virtual Surveyor now packs more processing muscle New tools to assist processing of large projects cap off a list of new features in Virtual Surveyor 6.2.

The Belgian firm is keen to emphasise the new release’s expanded processing capabilities, chiefly through a new clipping and mosaicking tool that allowing users to merge multiple smaller, processed portions of orthophotos and digital surface models together — allowing the processing of larger projects on the same underlying hardware.

“Our objective with Version 6.2 is to make our users more productive while saving them money by eliminating the need to invest in new hardware or processing services,” said Tom Op ‘t

Eyndt, CEO of Virtual Surveyor.

“We have addressed the fact that drones are capturing more data at higher resolution, resulting in enormous files sizes.”

The new release also features a 3D flythrough capability, enabling users to create animated ‘movies’ through their terrain model, improved surface handling for volume calculation and a concave hull extraction tool for creating a curved roadway in a series of clicks.

Improved boundary selection capabilities for removing unwanted features more efficiently, and a new sequential numbering tool round out the new tools in this update to the venerable suite.

Skydel launches updated GNSS simulation tool Manufacturer of GNSS simulation products, Skydel, has launched the 18th revision of its SDX GNSS simulation software, featuring support for atmospheric errors, SBAS improvements, and GNSS satellite antenna patterns and Galileo AltBOC support.

The company says that adding a new error type for atmospheric errors improves modelling significantly, and these errors can be compensated for with the SBAS corrections features for those users with the SBAS option installed.

The firm also says that userdefined antenna patterns can now be simulated, and applied to any satellites in the constellation being modelled.

SBG launches rangetopping NavSight IMU

Hexagon releases 3DReshaper 2018 MR1 New release of 3DReshaper brings three key workflow improvements and new capabilities over prior versions.

The new release has greatly streamlined the process of creating digital surface models, which can now be done with a single tool, with three different predefined grid sizes to apply to models, with varying levels of mesh detail.

The MR1 release features a new classifier for point clouds, which can

automatically detect and distinguish between walls and floors, to assist with cleaning point clouds or creating a 2D building’s plane preview.

The latest release now accepts Leica .lgs files, Riegl .rdbx files and supports exporting clouds in .e57 format. Leica BLK360 users can now import data directly from the scanner, though Hexagon notes that this feature is aimed at applications that only require a limited number of scans.

Launched January 29, SBG's Horizon is a high performance Fiber Optic Gyro (FOG)-based inertial measurement unit, taking its place above the Ekinox and Apogee IMUs in the NavSight product line.

According to SBG, the MicroElectro-Mechanical System (MEMS)based Ekinox and Apogee are aimed at most applications of camera and LiDAR motion compensation and georeferencing, while the Horizon is aimed at more demanding applications.

SBG claims that the closed-loop FOG architecture delivers very low bias and noise levels well-suited to low-dynamics survey applications. www.spatialsource.com.au 37

sssi

News and views from the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute

SSSI Board – 2019 President – Dr. Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse President-Elect – Paul Digney NSW Director – Wayne Patterson NT Director – Rob Sarib QLD Director – Lee Hellen SA Director – Franco Rea TAS Director – Paul Digney VIC Director – Richard Syme WA Director – Kerry Smyth ACT Director – Vacant Hydrography Commission Director – Richard Cullen YP representative (Observer) – Roshni Sharma Company Secretary – Jonathan Saxon

38 position February/March 2019

President’s report

I

wish all our SSSI members, board, chairs of regions and commission, staff a season’s greeting. We had a very productive 2018 for SSSI. I’d like to thank everyone for his or her contribution towards the development activities of the institute.

The past several months have been very busy for SSSI with the regional conference and APSEA Awards. Again, congratulations to all nominees and Award winners.

It is quite an exciting 2019 for our Australian geospatial community, as we will have a few significant national and international events take place on Australian soil. Locate19 during 8-10 April in Melbourne, SEASC 2019 during August 15-18 in Darwin and the GEO Plenary and UNGGIM Asia-Pacific meeting during early November in Canberra.

I also extend my wishes to Mr. Ewen Sneddon Honorary Fellow SSSI and Mr. Ray Tabulo Fellow SSSI for their induction into the SSSI Fellow community at Parliament House Brisbane last November.

The United Nations World Geospatial Information Congress

Our CEO Peter Olah and I had the opportunity to attend the inaugural United Nations World Geospatial Information Congress held by the United Nations and the government of China in Deqing, Zhejiang Province, China, November 19–21. Congress participants included geospatial experts and representatives from the highest levels of government from around the world. The event attracted more than 1,000 participants from 83 countries, various international organisations, and many geospatial technology and

information industry leaders. The Congress was organised by the UN-GGIM, a committee of experts acting as the apex intergovernmental mechanism for making joint decisions and setting directions with regard to the production, availability and use of geospatial information within national, regional and global policy frameworks. The congress theme was 'The Geospatial Way to a Better World' and was based around four plenary sessions and seven thematic streams. The city of Deqing also hosted a spectacular geographic information technology museum, which offered interactive displays demonstrating the way geospatial technologies impact a wide range of industries.

Peter and I had productive meetings with the Presidents of FIG, the International Cartographic Association, the former President of ISPRS, and the Hon. President of ASEAN FLAG. SSSI had a complimentary booth at the congress promoting Locate19, the South East Asian Survey Congress (SEASC) 2019 and international membership. We had a good interaction with the delegates. Roshni Sharma, national chair of the Young Professionals participated in the Young Professionals forum at the congress as SSSI YP representative, and she extended her support at the booth as well promoting SSSI to next generation professionals.

I delivered a talk at the UNGGIM Academic Network in my capacity as SSSI President on the topic, “Role of National Professional Body supporting SDG’s through Certification and CPD – An Australian Perspective”.

ASEAN Flag meeting

In early December I had a great opportunity to attend the 68th ASEAN Flag Council in Singapore as invitee to the council and to present at the seminar series. The platform brought all private sector surveyors in the ASEAN region together. ASEAN Flag is our joint partner to deliver the SEASC 2019 Congress at Darwin. It was very positive to note a number of overseas SSSI members were present at the Singapore event. Peter and I had the opportunity to discuss further collaboration with the ASEAN Flag. A MoU is being explored to be possibly executed at the SEASC Congress between ASEAN Flag and SSSI. Australia Day seminar

Peter Olah and I also had the opportunity to participate and present at the ISNSW

SSSI sustaining partners

Australia Day Seminar held in Sydney on 24-25 January, it was an excellent opportunity to meet the surveying fraternity in NSW and look forward for a stronger collaboration with ISNSW on national surveying and spatial sciences issues. The ISNSW hosted a president’s lunch inviting president, CEO, NSW Chair & QLD chairs of SSSI, the president of ISVIC and chairman of the board of Surveying and Spatial NZ including president-elect of ISNSW.

The leadership meeting was successful.Joint collaboration to strengthen the exchange of activities and communications between the associations, which will benefit respective society’s members, was agreed. The leadership group will meet at Locate19 again in Melbourne to discuss some common projects, which will benefit the members and spatial community.

Dr Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse SSSI President

Commission Chairs

CEO’s report

based on personality, policy and power. This has often been to the detriment of the organisations and the people they represent.

Many of these problems have been addressed over the last several years with the creation of bilateral Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs); documents designed to focus on shared values and aspirations for our industry and the people who make it work. And these MoUs have succeeded in encouraging a more professional and peaceful dialogue, without radically changing the landscape or providing a more unified voice for surveying and geospatial professionals.

Over the last year, the SSSI board – along with the leaders of several of our partner organisations in Australia and overseas – has asked the question, “is this enough?”.

The answer, generally agreed by all, is that we must do better. Our members, and all of the people in our sector, deserve to be represented in a way that delivers the best possible outcomes for the people in it.

Doing so is not about mergers or changing organisations or shutting them down, but about a commitment to working together beyond shared values, on shared strategic goals and projects. This is reflected in our Strategic Roadmap: Actively seek out partnering opportunities which deliver member value and/or a broader revenue base and review current MoUs for strategic fit And we are doing so. Right now we are in discussions with several of our partner organisations, here and overseas, about new MoUs to strengthen the relationships by focusing not just on values, but on shared projects. These projects will see us actively collaborate towards better outcomes for all our members, and all in the sector. Several of these MoUs will be finalised and announced in coming months.

It is not yet a new era, but perhaps one is in sight.

Peter Olah SSSI CEO

Remote Sensing & Photogrammetry Commission Chair Petra Helmholz chair.rspc@sssi.org.au

W

elcome to 2019.This will be a big year for SSSI and a year of change and disruption. Yes, they keep coming!

The surveying and geospatial industries have been rocked by disruption — and have created some disruption ourselves — for many years.

The ongoing emergence of new and revolutionary spatial technologies and professions is an ever-present challenge and opportunity. The omnipresence of spatial data in modern life is also both a disruptor and a significant opportunity.

Of course, some challenges and disruptions have different origins. It is no secret that the relationships between the major representative organisations in surveying and spatial — including SSSI — have not always been perfect. We have seen over the last two decades the harsh reality of relationships torn by divisions

Engineering & Mining Surveying Chair Andrew Edwards chair.emsc@sssi.org.au Hydrography Commission Chair Richard Cullen chair.hc@sssi.org.au Land Surveying Commission Chair Lindsay Perry chair.lsc@sssi.org.au

Spatial Information & Cartography Commission Chair Kerry Smyth chair.sicc@sssi.org.au

Regional Committee Chairs ACT Regional Chair Noel Ward chair.act@sssi.org.au NSW Regional Chair Gaby van Wyk (Interim Chair) chair.nsw@sssi.org.au NT Regional Chair Rob Sarib chair.nt@sssi.org.au QLD Regional Chair Paul Reed chair.qld@sssi.org.au SA Regional Chair Franco Rea chair.sa@sssi.org.au TAS Regional Chair Paul Digney chair.tas@sssi.org.au VIC Regional Chair Lindsay Perry chair.vic@sssi.org.au WA Regional Chair Lesley Arnold chair.wa@sssi.org.au SSSI National Office 27-29 Napier Cl, Deakin, ACT 2600 (PO Box 307) Phone: +61 2 6282 2282 Email: support@sssi.org.au

www.spatialsource.com.au 39

sssi Spatial Information & Cartography Commission report Building new networks and relationships

T

he new year season has been the time to refresh our ideas and planning for the year ahead.

We are pulling together to strengthen networks and build new relationships.

The Spatial Information and Cartography Commission has a particular interest in focusing communications, encouraging where possible a stream of relevant information and hot topics for our GIS professionals and mapping scientists.

The SI&C Commission is open to hear from you about the content of these communication channels and seeks to influence at a national level the access to media. We are here to influence the national agenda and need your feedback and support. This round-up of collaboration highlights the emerging trends in networking partnerships.

FOSS4G & SotM Oceania Emergency Evacuation FOS4G & SotM Oceania 2018 - Opening Ceremony Melbourne University

for cost effective entry into a wide variety of spatial topics. The workshops had an enjoyable relaxed collaborative feeling to them with attendees helping each other and ability to discuss topics with the knowledgeable organisers.

The main two-day conference was a multi stream event with 3 main rooms.

There was a healthy distribution of technical software presentations with a fantastic amount of real-world user and business perspective. Most attendees would have found times when they wanted to be in two places at once but the organisers did an amazing job of getting the videos of the sessions online within just a few days of the conference end.

With a wide background of attendees, the breaks provided a great networking opportunity to meet others in the wider spatial science industry. It was wonderful to have six international guests sponsored to attend the event. The community day, an optional fourth day, was a great way to learn how to contribute to open street map and also open source software at many technical and non-technical levels.

The organisers commitment to diversity was evident with the Women’s icebreaker breakfast (attracted more than 20 attendees) and travel grants for 6 international applicants. Both funded with philanthropic “Good Mojo” community donations.

Videos from the event are available for viewing at: https://foss4g-oceania.org/videos.

Homeward Bound program

Su Ling networking for SSSI

The inaugural Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial and State of the Map Oceania 2018 Conference (FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2018), was held at Melbourne University in November 2018.

This being the combination of two groups of ‘open’ people, the software people (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) and the data people (OpenStreetMap).

SSSI entered into a partnership agreement with the event organisers because we believed it would fit well with our strategy for a program of nationally distributed events that benefit SSSI members. Angus Scown was part of the SSSI team at the event and provides the following overview and insights.

The first day of the conference was a set of workshops which were all full.

There is a clear demand in the market

40 position February/March 2019

Raelene Forbes is Spatial Solutions Principal at Snowy Hydro Limited.

The Homeward Bound program is a leadership program, framed in the context of equity, sustainability and science, set against the backdrop of Antarctica. Here are some Inspiring words from SICC Committee member Raelene Forbes: “I'm Raelene Forbes and I'm the second SSSI member heading to the Antarctic continent as part of the Homeward Bound leadership program for women in STEM. If you've never heard of Homeward Bound, it aims to empower a network of 1,000 scientific women across the globe over 10 years

with the leadership skills and knowledge to drive sustainable change. Don't worry, 12 months ago I'd never heard of it either.

But the article on Mary-Ellen Feeney in Position last year inspired me to apply to the program, and well, here I am!

I'll admit, the chance to visit Antarctica was the big motivator initially, but now that my program is underway, it is definitely the icing, not the cake. Even before we've done any specific leadership skill development, the program has forced me to define the issues that are important to me and the courage to take action on them. Furthering gender equity, particularly in scientific and technical fields is one of these. Now I'm hosting a panel discussion and workshop for a NSW Women in Spatial event in Sydney on Feb 22, a first for me!

One of the streams of the program is visibility which has really captured my interest. When people think 'visibility' they most often think traditional media, social media etc but I have always seen cartography as a form of communication.

So I'm starting to look at how I can use cartography as a visibility tool and am working on an idea to use webmaps to curate a global collection of crowdsourced climate change stories. The aim is to illustrate local effects but as a collection provide a global picture. It'll be a challenge, but I'm up for it! Watch this space...”

For more information on Homeward Bound and how to apply, visit www. homewardboundprojects.com.au.

Kerry Smyth National Chair, Spatial Information & Cartography Commission

SSSI sustaining partners

Hydro Commission report A mix of old and new tools to bring down the cost of quality

I

t is a well-worn adage that only some 7 percent of the ocean floor has been adequately surveyed or seen by human eye, and that the craters on the dark side of the moon are better known than our own planet’s surface under the sea. Navigational uncertainty at sea arises from two main mechanisms.

The first is the potential offset between the local chart datum and the World Geodetic System Ellipsoid (WGS84). The second results from undiscovered (and possibly recently created) shallows. These shortfalls arise because, even today, the foundation for many charts of remote areas was laid by seafarers of a bygone age, when ships were driven by sail, positions were determined by sextant and chronometer, and depths were only sparsely sounded by a lead line.

The problem lies not so much in technical limitations, which have been largely addressed, but in the considerable resources required to accurately survey an area with modern instruments, balanced against the limited support available in many thinly-populated areas. The remote islands of the Ha’apai group in the Kingdom of Tonga represent one such case. iXblue have been contracted by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) under the Pacific Regional Navigation Initiative (PRNI) to conduct a modern survey of the Ha’apai island group to improve maritime safety, including hydrographic charts.

The Kingdom of Tonga is a small island chain in the southern Pacific Ocean.

Most people have no idea where it is. If it helps, think of Tonga as being about 2/3 of the way from Hawaii to New Zealand.

The image above gives the big picture.

Talking of a big picture, did you realise that, viewed from just the right angle from space, the Earth appears almost completely covered by the Pacific Ocean?

With only 100,000 inhabitants, spread over 170 islands strewn along a line of over 800 km, that’s a lot of ground to survey.

Tonga was nicknamed "The Friendly Islands" by Captain James Cook, as a result of a misunderstanding over a congenial reception accorded him on his first visit in 1773, which was actually a ruse to murder Cook and his men so the locals could loot his ship. The plan misfired and Captain Cook and his crew returned safely, none the wiser. In 18th century Tonga, apparently, dangerous

Where in the world is Tonga?

S/Y Jocara, with iXblue’s GPS buoy secured on deck

things lay just beneath the surface and perhaps, concerning charts, they still do.

Tonga lies on the Tonga-Kermadec ridge, a geologically active region formed by the collision of tectonic plates in the Southern Pacific, with a dramatic mix of coral reefs and active volcanoes, and when we say ‘active’, we mean it. A new island broke surface in 2015 near Hunga, between Ha’apai and Tongatapu, which is now some 4 km long and 100m high.

Undertaking hydrographic surveying for the purposes of nautical charting is a costly exercise. This is particularly the case when operating in remote regions of the world such as Tonga. In an effort to maximise the value of this survey project, a number of world first initiatives were implemented.

These included the use of Satellite Derived Bathymetry (SDB) to accurately position all of the islands and low-lying reefs across the survey area, the use of the new Leica Chiroptera 4x Bathymetric Lidar system for high resolution feature detection survey of the shallow water and coastal fringes, use of the iXblue DriX unmanned survey vessel (USV) and the use of a sailing yacht to provide a low-cost surface support platform.

DriX is an in-house designed, 8m long USV that can operate 24/7 with a multibeam sonar mounted 2m below the sea surface, able to stream real-time bathymetric data to a surface support vessel over WiFi, dramatically reducing multibeam surveying costs.

The second unusual feature of this solution is the low-cost surface support platform, an ocean-going sailing vessel.

This may not be big enough to support DriX, but it can host a four-man team for several weeks, providing a cost-effective

A fine young yellowfin tuna – sashimi and sushi on the menu tonight!

way to deliver the needed GPS and tide gauge network. So curiously, in a way, we have come full-circle since the days of Captain Cook and his original surveys, conducted from sailing vessels of old.

S/Y Jocara was chartered by iXblue to support its GPS and tidal survey team in August 2018, accompanied by a local Tongan surveyor as liaison.

Choosing S/Y Jocara was an unconventional move, but it makes good financial sense. While motor-driven ocean-going research vessels need to be relatively large (to accommodate fuel and engines), typically costing tens of thousands per day, a blue-water sailing vessel such as S/Y Jocara can be chartered for a fraction of the cost, and yet be an excellent platform for lightweight exploration and ocean engineering work in remote places. While relatively small (18m in length with a 4m beam), S/Y Jocara is full-ocean capable with an autonomous endurance between refueling/resupplying spanning months.

Jocara began her charter in North Island, New Zealand, by taking on board 400 kg of equipment, which she then ferried up to Nuku’alofa, in a 7-day ocean transit of 1,100 n.m. The survey team then flew in to Nuku’alofa to join her.

Each station required Jocara to stand by for 2-3 days while three GPS receivers collected sufficient data to establish (in post-processing) a GPS reference point and for the tide gauges to get a preliminary estimate of tidal components and phases.

Then the team would recover the GPS receivers, re-deploy the tide gauges to collect a longer-term record, and we’d move on to the next site. Each site was typically separated by 30-60 n.m. from its nearest neighbours, with the five sites distributed through the Tongan archipelago to provide the best network coverage.

At each station, our local surveyor from the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources was an invaluable liaison, often being called upon to explain why www.spatialsource.com.au 41

sssi these odd characters with their yellow tripods and brightly-coloured safety gear, carrying strange equipment, should be left unmolested to drill into rocks and concrete jetties, cementing in their GPS reference marks. Sometimes its hard to explain to a hard-working man, laboring under the weight of a pig or two, that it is so important not only to not bump into, but not even to touch, a sensitive tripod with its GPS receiver, surveyed to an accuracy of millimetres rather than metres.

As our work drew to a close, Jocara sailed back south to Nuku’alofa and eventually disembarked the iXblue survey team for their flights home. The team, more accustomed to working on specialised workboats, left with a new experience of surveying from a compact, wind-powered alternative surveying support vessel, finding it a novel but very pleasant alternative.

The food wasn’t too bad either, often supplemented by the fresh catch of the day, including sashimi and sushi.

S/Y Jocara is resident in the Tonga and New Zealand region and is available to support expeditions, research, adventure and eco-tourism anywhere in the world, given the time and water under her keel to get there. This article is derived from a longer one previously published by the IEEE OES in its December 2018 Beacon newsletter.

Dr. John R. Potter (Fellow, IEEE), David Field (iXblue), Casper J Potter (Jocara) and Andrew Price (iXblue).

Land Surveying Commission report Global Surveyors Day-21 March

I

n order to highlight the importance of surveyors, their job and the fields in which they work, the date 21 March has been chosen and named Global Surveyors’ Day. In recent years this has been a topic for consideration and supported by the Council of European Geodetic Surveyors (CLGE) and National Society of Professional Surveyors USA (NSPS) who previously had their own commemoration dates. The 21st March is supported

by FIG, who have held a number of discussion forums in considering such a date. It is fully recognised that it is very important for the world to reflect on the work that surveyors do. It is essential to know the impact that the various kinds of surveyors can have all over the world.

The inaugural Global Surveyors’ Day was held at short notice on 21 March last year and was specifically commemorated at the World Bank Land and Poverty Conference held in Washington DC. It is the hope that this day will be celebrated around the world. It can be celebrated in many different ways, and it is up to the surveyors in each national organisation to find their best way to celebrate the day. The Land Surveying Commission is proposing to commemorate this day around the country and is interested in suggestions from members for appropriate commemorative activities and projects.

The Forum of Regional Bodies (FoRB) The inaugural meeting of the Forum of Regional bodies was held at the FIG Working Week in Christchurch in 2016. Subsequent meetings have since been held at the FIG Working Weeks in Helsinki in 2017 and in Istanbul last year and recently on October 8 &9. SSSI has been in attendance at all these meetings.

42 position February/March 2019

The Goals of the Forum of Regional Bodies are: • Exchange best practices • Network, support and learn from each other • Advise and support FIG activities • Creation and promotion of a Global Surveyors Day ( now 21st March) The FoRB undertook to continue the findings of the Mutual Recognition of Professional Qualifications Work Plan being undertaken by FIG Commission 1. It has recommended an active involvement in International Coalitions such as the International Land Measurements Standards Coalition (ILMS) and it is supporting actions in the field of exchanges about Regional GNSS solutions. Also discussed was the development of the “Code of Professional Qualifications for Property Surveyors” and “European Requirements for Property Surveyor Activities” FoRB is investigating putting together a forum of major GNSS bodies with representatives from the primary Government agencies and managing organisations for the likes of GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, NAVIC and QZSS at the upcoming Working Week in Hanoi.

FoRB meeting, participants resolved to continue with periodic virtual meetings in two shifts to overcome time zone differences and provide a dedicated page on the FIG website for information exchange and perhaps publish it on You Tube. The next Virtual Meeting is proposed for late January.

FIG Future Working Weeks Listed below are future FIG Conferences and Working Weeks.

• 2019 Hanoi Vietnam 22-26 April • 2020 Amsterdam The Netherlands 10-14 May • 2021 Accra Ghana • 2022 XXVII Congress Cape Town, South Africa

International Land Measurement Standards Coalition The ILMS coalition website is now live at https://ilmsc.org/ This is a big step forward for ILMS adoption.

An exposure draft of the ILMS Standard was released last year for comments which closed on 31st December. The final draft of the Standard is just about ready for circulation and will be translated into French, Spanish, German & Arabic and a hard copy production.

The production of a ‘client guide’ ILMS output is being proposed that is targeted at policy makers, users, acquiring authorities, other professionals, finance institutions etc which contains the main point of ILMS in an easy to digest language & format.

Festival of Terminalia Feb 23rd marks the date of an ancient Roman festival called Terminalia.

This was celebrated annually by the Romans in honour of Terminus the god of boundaries and the protector of the limits of both private and public property.

The stones used to mark borders were sacred and were drenched annually with sacrificial blood and then flowers placed on them to renew their protective powers. The owners of adjacent properties assembled on their boundaries and set up offerings of food with their neighbours. Anyone who ever removed a boundary stone was slain with impunity, although a fine was later substituted.

Perhaps the modern-day equivalent is get together with your neighbours and have a barbecue!

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