Position issue 93 February-March 2018

February/March 2018 – No. 93

The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

POLE POSITION Outpacing the field with reality capture

Official publication of

inside Throwing down UNSW invests in spatial's future

What’s in an address?

Cutting-edge solutions to an ancient problem

Art of the cadastre The crucial discipline of cadastral surveying

Geospatial

contents

February/March 2018 No.93

28

18

20 features 14 Q&A with Ed Parsons The man in charge of Google’s geospatial activities sits down with Position.

18 Saving lives with location The team pioneering new approaches to public health through positioning.

20 What’s in an address?

Contemporary solutions to an ancient problem.

23 GDA2020 An update on our brand new datum's implementation.

26 Q&A with Flavia Tata-Nardini CEO of the fastest-growing Australian space startup chats about nanosatellites, IoT and the future of the space industry.

26 28 The mysterious art of cadastral surveying A primer on an historic discipline in the age of GIS.

32 Hands off From scan to model with full automation.

34 Laying the foundation UNSW pulls out all the stops to establish a geospatial research centre..

regulars 4 7 8 36 38

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

Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster returning to Earth in a controlled landing.

Upcoming Events 20 March: Xtreme weather conference, Brisbane, Qld https://xtremeweather.com.au 21-23 March: Surveying 2018 Congress, Sydney, NSW www.surveying2018congress.com.au 9-11 April: Locate ’18 and Geosmart Asia ’18, Adelaide, SA http://geosmartasia.org

upfront

17 April: 7th Digital Earth Summit (DES-2018) El Jadida, Morocco www.desummit2018.org

One small step

S

pace milestones have been coming thick and fast in the past year. It could be described as the year in which ‘new space’ – the catch-all term for the current breed of commercial space startups innovating their way into orbit – knocked ‘old space’ off its perch. Elon Musk’s commercial galactic enterprise SpaceX stole headline after headline with their elaborate rocket choreography, and Australia made serious inroads towards developing a domestic industry around this new space race.

There’s more to new space’s achievements beyond the spectacular theatrics of a Tesla Roadster on its way to Mars, however. The ingenious economic logic of reusable rockets, combined with the newly-flexed payload muscle of Falcon Heavy – their super-heavy lift launch vehicle – means that SpaceX is in a position to drastically undercut legacy contractors for the most significant and rigorous of deep space missions.

In 2017, SpaceX also became the first commercial operator to resupply the International Space Station with its Dragon capsule, reusing its Falcon 9 rockets in another world-first – but SpaceX is not the only game in town. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin also test-launched their own Crew Capsule 2.0 and New Shepard booster in December 2017, both units arcing back to Earth in a graceful ballet.

Back on home soil, the federal government’s announcement of a national space agency in September 2017 formalised an intent to cash in on a $420 billion global industry, even if the design and extent of this commitment are not yet clear. South Australia has been busily establishing itself as the epicentre for all things space, with Premier Jay Weatherill lobbying hard ahead for the agency announcement, establishing

4 position February/March 2018

a space industry centre in the state and hosting the International Astronautical Congress in September 2017.

Finally, in an announcement cementing the state’s commitment to supporting new space commercial enterprise, South Australia awarded a $500,000 grant to local space startup Fleet to launch and manage their proposed fleet of nanosatellites.

Let’s hope that when the recommendations from the government’s review into Australia’s space industry come back in the first quarter of 2018, they’re strong enough to support a lean, efficient and strong national agency to lead and regulate this exhilarating new chapter – and capitalise on the rapidly building momentum in this sector. ■ SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy after taking off from Kennedy space centre on February 6, 2018.

May 1: FME World Tour 2018 Canberra, Canberra, ACT www.safe.com/worldtour May 3: FME World Tour 2018 Melbourne, Melbourne, Vic www.safe.com/worldtour/ May 10: FME World Tour 2018 Perth, Perth, WA www.safe.com/worldtour/ July 29-August 2: 12D International Conference 2018, Brisbane, Qld www.12d.com/community/2018_ conference.php October 2: 6th International FIG 3D Cadastre Workshop, Delft, The Netherlands www.gdmc.nl/3DCadastre/ workshop2018

SAVE UP TO

$10,000

SAVE UP TO

$6,000

ON TOPCON HiPer HR

ON TOPCON GT

ELITE SURVEY SUMMER SPECIALS Take advantage of our summer specials across the Elite Suite range to save time, up your productivity and spend more time enjoying summer!

• Save up to $6,000 on Topcon’s premium GT robotic station, and up to $10,000 on Topcon’s latest and greatest GNSS, the HiPer HR. • Ask about our great package deals! Topcon GT Total Station • Offer Ends 31st March 2018 https://www.positionpartners.com.au/gt-summer-specials-2017.htm

Get in touch today:

1300 867 266 info@positionpartners.com.au www.positionpartners.com.au Australia • New Zealand • SE Asia

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.

A 12 month subscription (6 issues) is AUD$76.00. To subscribe visit www.intermedia.com.au, phone 1 800 651 422 or email: subscriptions@intermedia.com.au.

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 Bridging worlds

A

s 2018 leaps forwards at a blistering pace, we find ourselves in a unique position. While technology continues to race on, ever-accelerating and proliferating, disciplines begin to splice together as professionals from disparate backgrounds look for commonalities: frameworks, tools and approaches from other spheres that can generate insight and expand the scope of geospatial practice. Yet as these new frontiers are exposed, a curious truth is revealed.

To advance in any lasting and meaningful way, we cannot ignore the past. As the GDA2020 datum is formally gazetted, replacing a 24-year-old standard, reflecting on the core discipline of cadastral land surveying seems appropriate – a timely reminder of the centrality of land tenure to our way of life. The thrill and potential offered by new space, celebrated in the awe of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch, channels the achievement and optimism of Apollo-era space titans, right down to the choice of launch pad, historic pad 39A at Kennedy space centre.

For this issue, we’ve assembled a selection of exclusive articles around this theme –reflecting upon the roots of surveying practice, and exploring some of the evolving means in which spatial analysis techniques and technology can push the human quest for knowledge and understanding forward. Surveying educator Dr. Craig Roberts pens an explainer on the past and future of cadastral land surveying on page 28. Ed Parsons, geospatial technologist for a little company called Google, explains how to make location services as essential as a toothbrush (page 14).

The woman behind the startup at the vanguard of Australia’s home-grown new space industry, Flavia Tata-Nardini of Fleet Space Technologies, sits down with us on page 26.

Industry writer Jon Fairall investigates a cutting-edge approach to addressing systems (page 20), unpacking the core requirements and assumptions of such a system as he does so. We examine the emerging field of geo-health, and some of the barriers to its implementation in Australia on page 18, and shine the spotlight on a leading Australian tertiary education that’s investing in the future of spatial data in a major way (page 34).

I invite you take some time to reflect on which knowledge structures and core values should remain foundational, as the future manifests around us – and hope that you enjoy Issue 93 of Position.

Daniel Bishton EDITOR

April/May 2018 – Issue #94

NEXT ISSUE

The Locate ‘18 and Geosmart Asia ’18 super-issue • Best leveraging location -- spatially empowered government and services • Augmented reality -- bringing realism to spatial data • The business of geospatial -- leveraging new technology and business models • Space infrastructure -- investigating beyond the surface Published: 30/03/2018 Advertising booking deadline: 06/03/2018 Advertising material deadline: 09/03/2018

www.spatialsource.com.au 7

news First high-resolution map of the Great Barrier Reef released One and a half million square kilometres of bathymetric seafloor data have been released to the public by Geoscience Australia, under partnership with James Cook University and the Australian Hydrographic Service.

The project carried out high-resolution bathymetric scans, which were combined with existing datasets held by the government to create the most comprehensive, detailed models produced to date.

The release comes as the federal government announced a $60 million investment in protective measures for the Great Barrier Reef, which include increasing the number

Bathymetric images of hook line reefs, released by Geoscience Australia and James Cook University.

of culling vessels for crownof-thorns starfish from three to eight, measures to shield the Reef from polluted water, and investment in Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and the CSIRO to

“develop new ways for the reef to adapt and recover”.

“The Great Barrier Reef data is the first in a series of ‘30-metre’ datasets that will be released as part of this project,” said Dr Robin Beaman,

research leader for the James Cook University team on the coastline mapping project.

“This represents the highest resolution depth model of the Great Barrier Reef to date.”

“We’re using cuttingedge scientific techniques to combine historical and newlyacquired bathymetry data of the entire northern coastline of Australia,” he said.

The data from this first release is available in a range of formats via the Geoscience Australia website at www.ga.gov.au.

Adelaide lands space mission control centre Fleet Space Technologies will build and staff a round-theclock mission control centre in Adelaide’s western suburbs to track its planned constellation of nano-satellites.

The Adelaide-based company recently received a $500,000AUD Future Jobs Growth Fund grant, to be used to establish the project dubbed Mission Control South Australia.

Fleet Space’s CEO Flavia Tata-Nardini said the

company is matching the grant with its own funds, and that the initiative will create 17 full-time jobs in IT and advanced manufacturing.

“Australia’s local space industry is buzzing,” said Tata-Nardini. “The mission control centre highlights the momentum, growth and commitment of government and industry to build a dynamic and ambitious space industry on Australian

soil. It really is an exciting time to be a space business in South Australia!”

Tata-Nardini said the first of the company’s fleet of 100 tiny satellites, which will connect billions of devices to the Internet of Things, or IOT, are on track to launch this year. “Once live, this network will create a digital nervous system that covers the planet, creating a world more connected than ever before,” she said.

South Australia is emerging as a hub for Australia’s fledgling space industry, launching its own space industry last year and joining the initiative to push for a national space agency.

These efforts will be highlighted at the Locate ‘18/ GeoSmart Asia conference being held at the Adelaide Convention Centre from 9-11 April, with Fleet’s Tata-Nardini set to deliver a keynote address.

Boeing and CSIRO announce expanded partnership As Australia prepares to launch a national space agency, Boeing and CSIRO have revealed a strengthened, expanded partnership aimed at supercharging new space R&D. In the January announcement at Boeing’s facility in El Segundo, California, the firm says that new phase of the partnership between the organisations is designed to take full advantage of the opportunities presented

by Australia’s rapidly expanding space industry.

CSIRO has maintained a working collaboration with the aerospace giant since

8 position February/March 2018

1989, and this announcement sees them setting their sights on new space projects in Australia.

The joint research will explore opportunities for space infrastructure and groundbased facilities in Australia that could benefit a range of space-related activities, with anticipated research directions including the development of novel materials, sensors and data analytics.

“Boeing has worked with nations and companies around the world to explore the wonders of space since the very beginning of the space

Maureen Dougherty, president of Boeing Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific, Ambassador Joe Hockey and Larry Marshall, CEO of CSIRO. Image provided by CSIRO.

age,” said Jim Chilton, senior vice president of Boeing Space and Missile Systems.

“Now with Australia on the cusp of its own exciting space age, Boeing couldn’t have a better Australian R&D partner

than CSIRO to work with on emerging space technologies.”

Scientists from the US and Australia will collaborate on areas focused on the developing needs of the Australian space market.

Location Intelligence Geographic Information Systems

news WWI mystery solved with discovery of AE1 Australia’s first naval submarine has been discovered 103 years after its wartime disappearance.

The HMAS AE1 disappeared with all hands off the coast of Papua New Guinea on September 14, 1914. The wreck’s discovery in late December 2017 brings closure to one of Australia’s oldest maritime mysteries, and reveals the final resting place of the submarine’s 35-strong crew.

An object of interest was located from the survey vessel Fugro Equator on December 19 and further inspection confirmed that it was AE1.

The sea floor was scanned with a multibeam echosounder mounted on the hull of Fugro

Sonar scan shows HMAS AE1 on the sea floor off Rabaul, Papua New Guinea. Image copyright Commonwealth of Australia.

Equator and also aboard the Echo Surveyor 5 AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle), which operated at a constant altitude of 35 metres,

through strong undersea currents and the complex terrain of the search area, which was located between two land masses.

The first images captured show the vessel is remarkably well preserved and apparently in one piece.

Following the discovery of the submarine, a small commemorative service was conducted onboard the Fugro Equator to remember the crew, made up of 35 Australian, New Zealand and British sailors. Efforts are being made to contact the descendants of the crew.

Twelve previous attempts to locate AE1 by private and government entities were unsuccessful.

Lifeguard drone saves swimmers off NSW coast The Little Ripper Rescue drone had a busy first day on patrol off Lennox Head, saving two teenagers struggling in the surf 700 metres off NSW’s far north coast.

The swimmers’ salvation came in the form of a flotation device dropped by the specially kitted out DJI Matrice 600 Pro UAV modified and developed by

NSW-based company Little Ripper Lifesaver.

Local lifeguards got their first crack at using the rescue drone just that morning, and when a supervisor spotted the teens in trouble, it took just minutes to launch the drone and fly it over to them.

Surf Life Saving NSW project manager for unmanned aerial vehicles

(UAV), Kelvin Morton, told the ABC that the project was a world-first.

“These UAVs that we’re using to drop these inflatable pods is innovative,” he said.

“We know that most or all of the lifesaving organisations around the world are stepping back and waiting to see how this goes.”

The drone is one of two

patrolling the coastline between Byron Bay and Port Macquarie as part of a trial in partnership with the NSW Department of Primary Industries and Surf Life Saving NSW. Surveying and photoimaging distributor CR Kennedy supplied the sixrotor DJI M600 Pro that was used in the rescue.

NZ reaches orbit with successful Rocket Lab launch The small satellite boom received a boost as Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket reached orbit, successfully deploying three satellites.

The launch off the Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand’s North Island in January is the first ever to use a private launch pad. It marks a significant step forward in the burgeoning small satellite industry as companies from a range of industries look for ways to send small, cheaper satellites to space.

Rocket Lab says it eventually plans to be launching on a weekly basis at a comparatively low price tag of $6,500,000AUD per launch.

10 position February/March 2018

The American-New Zealand company later revealed that the Electron flight carried what they call a 'kick stage' that is used to manoeuvre several satellites into different circular orbits.

The kick stage consists of a small restartable rocket engine, and during the latest test the company says the device successfully circularized the orbits of two Spire Lemur-2 CubeSats on board.

Rocket Lab CEO and founder Peter Beck said in a statement that the kick stage opens up significantly more orbital options, particularly for rideshare customers that have traditionally been limited

Image courtesy of Rocket Lab.

to the primary payload’s designated orbit.

Australian National University astrophysicist Brad Tucker told the ABC that the launch was a win for the little

guys. “Rocket Lab is a small start-up, a few people and a dream— it really shows what can happen in the modern day space area,” Professor Tucker said.

UNSW announces geospatial information centre

Flying cars may race Australian skies in 2018 An Australian startup is developing retro-styled, manned flying vehicles designed with one objective in mind: competition.

Sydney-based Alauda unveiled the Mark 1 earlier this year. The electric, lowaltitude aircraft looks like a 1950s-era Formula One car crossed with a quadcopter — but is large enough to carry a human pilot. Once completed, Alauda claim that it will propel that brave soul to speeds topping 200 kilometres per hour.

The Mark 1 is equipped with four custom 50-kW motors, and powered by the same cells used in the battery of a Tesla Model S. With a nod to science fiction, Alauda has lifted the

term ‘Airspeeder’ to describe this new category of vehicle.

Alauda is entering a crowded field, as a number of firms around the world are developing ‘flying car’ concepts, including Airbus and Uber. Alauda’s CEO Matthew Pearson says the company is deliberately creating a vehicle to turn heads and working on a showcase event aimed to spur development similar to racing’s impact on the early automobile.

“Racing will push the technology like nothing else,” he says. “It’s not enough to build the speeder: we have to build the sport.

We want to bring the excitement and values of Formula 1 to the sky.”

UNSW’s Faculty of the Built Environment has announced a brand new geospatial research centre to be headed by Dr. Sisi Zlatanova, a world-renowned expert in 3D mapping of public space.

One of primary goals of the research centre will be to develop 3D models of public buildings in the Sydney CBD and on the UNSW campus, with the intention to improve accessibility, safety and emergency response procedures.

Professor Zlatanova has led a number of research groups in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for crisis response at her previous post of Zelft University in The Netherlands, and set up training schools on 3D modelling in universities in

Germany, China, Russia, Italy, Bulgaria and Spain.

Professor Zlatanova said the scarcity of current 3D indoor models for large buildings and offices in Australia could cause complications for stakeholders, particularly for those working in safety management of public spaces.

“The first projects will look at navigation between indoor and outdoor space, how people enter and exit buildings, 3D analysis of shadowing, and underground infrastructure, including pipelines, cables and electric wiring,” she said.

The centre is funded directly by UNSW, and its resources and modelling outputs will be available to PhD candidates, post- and undergraduates as they become available.

#Locate18

9-11 April 2018, Adelaide, Australia

Theme: The Art, Science and Business of Geospatial

Don’t let the opportunity to participate at AsiaPacific’s premier geospatial conference slip away! #Locate18

REGISTER NOW

www.geosmartasia.org / www.locateconference.com

news Firm to locate MH370 or go empty-handed Texas-based Ocean Infinity could reap up to $70 million for locating Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 — or no fee at all if it fails.

A new, and hopefully final, chapter in the nearly four year search for the missing Boeing 777 has begun with the announcement of Ocean Infinity’s contract to search for the wreckage on a ‘no cure, no fee’ arrangement.

The announcement follows the suspension of the joint Malay-Chinese-Australian search for the missing plane in January 2017, following almost three years of intensive, but ultimately

A rendering of the Seabed Constructor, and HUGIN ‘free-flying’ AUVs. Image supplied by Ocean Infinity.

fruitless search efforts to locate the fuselage and flight recorders at an estimated cost of $200 million.

The Ocean Infinity-operated vessel Seabed Constructor set

off from Durban South Africa in early January and includes a fleet of eight “free-flying” AUVs, which the company says can operate untethered independent missions in order

to go deeper and provide higher quality data.

“Whilst there can be no guarantees of locating the aircraft, we believe our system of multiple autonomous vehicles working simultaneously is well suited to the task at hand,” says Ocean Infinity’s CEO Oliver Plunkett.

Ocean Infinity’s says its search will focus initially on the zone identified by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. The project is expected to last for 90 days.

AirMap and Airways NZ trial drone traffic management system

Airmap’s airspace management dashboard. Image provided by Airmap.

New Zealand drone pilots can now request airspace approval from the country’s Civil Aviation Authority from their smartphones at Christchurch, Queenstown and Wanaka airports under an unmanned

traffic management (UTM) system trial.

Airways, New Zealand’s air navigation service provider, have partnered with AirMap, a California-based drone airspace service provider,

to trial their UTM system at selected airports and public lands in the Canterbury and Queenstown regions.

Participants can use AirMap’s iOS and Android apps to seek necessary airspace and public landowner approvals to fly, file flight plans, and access real–time information about other aircraft in the area, allowing them to stay safely separated.

Airways says that drone flights are increasing exponentially in New Zealand, with the number of flights recorded increasing from 30 to 600 per week over the past three years. These flights are supporting essential

sectors including emergency services and inspections and monitoring in the power and utility industries.

“The trial is an important step in investigating how Airways could develop a UTM system that safely integrates drones into New Zealand’s wider air traffic control network,” says Airways Chief Executive Officer Graeme Sumner. “There is potential for New Zealand to become a test-bed for the UAV industry through the implementation of a system that supports growth and development in a safe manner.”

The free service will be available throughout the trial until mid-March.

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 2018

• In April 2017, unusually heavy rains caused floods, and a massive landslide in Mocoa, Putumayo province, Colombia.

• Over 300 people lost their lives and more than 4000 people were displaced

Drone mapping saves lives:

Pix4D USER WORKSHOPS

Canadian RescUAV team helps 4000 people return home after fatal landslide in Colombia

Perth

Answering an international call for help The Colombian governmental agency coordinating the response, Unidad Nacional para la Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres (UNGRD) sent an international call for help.

In response, Canadian-based GlobalMedic’s RescUAV team partnered up with Aeryon Labs Inc and went to Mocoa to join forces with local emergency response organizations. In emergency situations, GlobalMedic’s RescUAV provides imagery and 3D mapping for search and rescue and situational awareness.

A complex postdisaster landscape In this particular situation, the limited data connectivity added complexity to the operation, and Brett Simms, RescUAV Team Lead, approached Pix4D’s Paul Spaur, who has worked as a Paramedic in search and rescue and on a law enforcement helicopter.

Paul shared his experience using Pix4D solutions in emergency response, to aid GlobalMedic’s efforts:

“There is incredible use in generating fast, and actionable maps during a disaster response. Incident Command can define areas of interest as .kml files, and disseminate them to multiple field crews. The crews can import their areas into Pix4Dcapture, fly a drone autonomously, and capture data. They can then move the images from the drone to a field laptop, and rely on the fully offline (and secure) processing capability of Pix4Dmapper Pro to make maps that can save lives.”

Generating actionable data on the go Equipped with a generator, two Aeryon SkyRanger (UAVs), a laptop, and Pix4Dmapper Pro, the team was ready to face the challenge of operating in a disaster zone with difficult terrain and limited power and data access.

RescUAV mapped over 200 hectares, accompanied emergency task forces, captured imagery, video and also generated 3D maps in the field. All of this made it possible to assess terrain conditions on the go.

April 9 - 10

Brisbane April 12 - 13

For more information: pix4d.com/ training-certification or training@pix4d.com

Maps that save lives These maps were also used by local authorities to quantify and manage critical infrastructure damage, identify areas that stood at risk of future floods and landslides and plan actions and infrastructure to allow displaced populations to safely return home.

Flexible workflows adaptable to changing circumstances Pix4D is the first drone-based photogrammetry software in the market offering offline and online capabilities in one single solution, allowing flexible workflows adaptable to changing circumstances.

Discover Pix4D solutions today! Get a free trial: cloud.pix4d.com/signup

www.spatialsource.com.au 13

q&a

Q&A with Ed Parsons Position is proud to present this interview with Google's geospatial technologist, one of the people directly responsible for the colossal uptake of mobile location-based services globally, ahead of his keynote presentation at Locate ’18 – Geosmart Asia ‘18.

Ed Parsons is Google’s geospatial technologist, with responsibility for evangelising Google’s mission to organise the world’s information using geography. He maintains links with governments, universities, research and standards organisations which are involved in the development of geospatial technology. He is a member of the the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium and was co-chair of the W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web Working Group.

Parsons is also a visiting professor at University College London and an executive fellow at the University of Aberdeen Business School. Prior to joining Google, Ed was the first Chief Technology Officer in the 200-year-old history of Ordnance Survey, and was instrumental in moving the focus of the organisation from mapping to geographical information. He came to the Ordnance Survey from Autodesk, where he was EMEA Applications Manager for the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Division. He holds a Masters degree in Applied Remote Sensing from Cranfield Institute of Technology, an Honorary Doctorate in Science from Kingston University, London and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Google Maps has a unique and enviable position in the world of consumerfocused mapping services. What are Google’s – and your – objectives in providing geospatial services?

I think it's fair to say the objectives of Google Maps has changed and indeed expanded over time. Initially back in 2005 this was simply to provide context to local search results, a goal originally achieved using MapQuest maps, before Google

14 position February/March 2018

Ed Parsons, pictured with Google’s Street View Trekker camera in Rome, October 2015.

developed its own capability. Over the last decade Maps has become more of a realtime assistant, or like a knowledgeable guide that senses the world around you, identifies what's important to you as an individual at any location, at any time and provides relevant information to you - which may or may not actually be in the form of a map!

I’m interested to hear your interpretation of the term ‘geospatial culture’ – what does it mean to you, and do you see its uptake and understanding developing in broader society currently?

Interesting question. As a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society I have always been rather amused by the

modern ‘geospatial’ term, to me it is really all about geography - explaining why the world looks like it does, and answering questions like ‘Why are rivers where they are?’, or ‘Why do some parts of a city thrive while others parts decline?’ I’ve always thought that such an interest was fundamental to both good governance and economic development, and today we have at our disposal tools to measure our world at a level of detail unimaginable only a few years ago.

But we don't necessarily have many leaders who think geographically – who immediately see the connections between activities based on their location. This is an issue at all levels of society – from a teenager not understanding the

Who do you think stands to benefit most profoundly from the level of proliferation and understanding of the geospatial industry’s potential – what does a fully realized ‘spatial society’ look like to you?

We all do. As individuals, our industry has the potential to make all of our lives better in terms of saving time, reducing our impact on the environment and making better use of the resources we have access to. Of course, there is a massive scaling effect that works when we multiply these individual gains by the 7.5 billion people on the planet!

What can you tell our readers about the ‘toothbrush test’, and what is its significance?

The ‘toothbrush test’ is a very simple maxim that Larry Page, co-founder of Google uses to assess how useful a product or service is – it should be as useful as your toothbrush, i.e. something you will use once or twice per day, and will make your life better.

The ideas is that its use should become so common that it just becomes part of what you do, you really don't think about it. At Google we aim for all our products, like Google Maps for mobile, to pass the toothbrush test. I think that often in the geospatial industry, we sometimes lose focus on the potential users of our products. Does what we do really benefit our users in a meaningful way – how well do we really understand the needs of our users?

How do you think we can expect to see patterns of content generation evolve for spatial services in the coming years?

potential risks of publishing geocoded photos of themselves and their friends, to governments planning hydroelectric schemes. I see greater use of geospatial technology in our day-to-day lives, indeed an order of magnitude increase – but I don't see a similar broadening of understanding.

How do your activities at Google aim to help this concept evolve, and could you describe any potential roadblocks you see to this end?

My challenge is to fix that lack of awareness or understanding in geospatial technology. I characterise the challenge as a ‘power of ten’ problem. Geospatial technology now develops at a pace

ten times faster than society is able to assimilate; what the early adopter (myself and many of the readers of this magazine) immediately start using may take years to reach mainstream use.

Policymakers responsible for regulation to protect society work ten times more slowly than society, often playing catchup to developments that have caused market disruption and media interest. As an example of this look at the impact of new delivery and ride-sharing businesses like Uber. Fundamentally entities like these are products of the development of geospatial technology and follow the pattern of technology developing ten times faster than society – which is ten times faster than the regulators.

I think for some time now, much of the spatial data used in consumer-focused applications is actually created by the users themselves, often implicitly as part of using a product or service. For example, the real time data on traffic speeds in Google Maps comes from other users providing anonymous speed data as they move around. This is just the beginning for this type of probe data with more and more internet-connected devices – most of which are location aware and collecting data as part of their operation.

I think we can also expect to see more explicit collection of data – in the form of images geocoded by mobile phones and consumer drones – finding its way into global datasets, with machine learning techniques being utilised to extract meaningful information from these images, e.g. street signs and business names. As a result, spatial data will become more and more current and in some cases nearly real-time. ■ www.spatialsource.com.au 15

partner feature

TAYLORS TAKES POLE POSITION The Australian Formula 1® Grand Prix is one of the few temporary sporting tracks in the world which requires full construction. Taylors’ use of cutting edge technology in 3D reality capture, processing and modelling provides the foundation mapping that is crucial to delivering Australia’s premier racing event.

T

he Australian Formula 1® Grand Prix is one of the most anticipated sporting events of the year on the Melbourne calendar. Every March, hundreds of thousands of people descend on the Albert Park track, which only months before was quiet parkland. This transformation is the largest temporary overlay for any annual sporting event in the world and requires myriad companies behind the scenes to build a world-class race track from the ground up.

In 2011, the Australian Grand Prix Corporation engaged Taylors to provide the surveying and geospatial services that underpin the construction of all track and event facilities. This includes the set out of all site facilities including track barrier lines, tyre buffers, gravel trap perimeters, perimeter fencing, rope and post car displays, marquees, grandstands, corporate platforms and pavilions and every other structure present. Anthony Emmerson, General Manager for the Infrastructure team at Taylors, said “We survey everything from the grandstands to the sprinkler leads. Every piece of infrastructure that is placed, when turning a parkland into a grand prix circuit, has its exact positioning provided by us.”

Each year, event attendance at the Grand Prix has grown and this has led to increases in event facilities needed to accommodate race goers. As a result new challenges constantly arise that must be addressed to ensure the event’s exceptional quality and short timeframe

16 position February/March 2018

requirements are met. Mr Emmerson explains, “It’s a very high pressure environment, with a very fixed deadline that just can’t be missed. There are so many different contractors and partners, around 40 to 50 companies, that all have to work together efficiently. The Australian Grand Prix Corporation and APP have created a really cohesive team, and it’s a pleasure to be part of that team.”

Taylors realised early on that addressing these challenges would require a solutions-focused approach incorporating the latest in survey and geospatial technology. Managing Director of Taylors, Mr. Richard Cirillo, believes

it is this approach that has continued to improve the value of their surveying contribution over the years and helped Taylors play their part in ensuring the track meets the highest standards year on year. “Success is all about reliability and being able to fit into a big, welloiled machine that, in a very short space of time, transforms Albert Park into a Formula 1® Grand Prix circuit and major event for over 250,000 people. You’ve got to be fast, accurate and know exactly what you’re doing,” Mr Cirillo said.

From the very beginning Taylors introduced cutting edge technology and implemented several new surveying techniques that increased the efficiency of the project. “We reduced the number of people required on-site by implementing one person field teams and GPS technology, as well as the use of line work, rather than coordinates.”

The biggest improvements have come in the years since, with the implementation of Drone Photogrammetry, Mobile Laser Scanning, Reality Modelling and the use of Australia’s only Trimble Indoor Mobile Mapping System (TIMMS).

These innovations have enabled Taylors to measure and define features with remarkable accuracy and in a much shorter time frame. Once the data is captured it is incorporated into various design and modelling suites for real-time measuring, modelling and visualization.

The result is meaningful, relevant and easy to understand information.

MAIN IMAGE: Taylors mobile laser scan data – track level.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Taylors setting out GP infrastructure.

TOP LEFT: Taylors Inspire UAV performing field work.

TOP RIGHT: Taylors confirming clearance height.

BELOW RIGHT: Orthographic aerial image of Australian F1 GP 2017 - compiled from Taylors drone data.

BELOW LEFT: Taylors mobile laser scan data – entire circuit.

“Staying innovative and competitive is a big focus for Taylors. The advances we continue to make in spatial data capture and visualization technology are extremely beneficial to our business, our clients and the broader industry. We believe that embracing and developing innovative technology is essential to remaining a leader in the field and making us a provider of choice”, says Mr Cirillo. “Developing solutions that apply our expertise in ground breaking technologies to achieve the best results for our clients is a challenge that keeps us driven. The partnership with the Australian Grand Prix Corporation has been the perfect opportunity for these innovations to shine.”

More recently, Taylors developed a 3D Reality Model of the entire Grand Prix site. This Reality Model has numerous uses and implications for overall event planning and management. It allows the AGPC to view the results of potential plan

“Every piece of infrastructure that is placed, when turning a parkland into a grand prix circuit, has its exact positioning provided by us.”

Anthony Emmerson, General Manager Infrastructure Team, Taylors

changes in real-time leading to improved outcomes and increased efficiency. The model can also be used for measurement of current features, with video fly throughs, and incorporates design models and allows virtual reality tours of the site.

Moving around a Reality Model is as easy as pointing where you want to be and ‘teleporting’. You even have audio of the cars as they drive past.

This year Taylors have added a new feature to the Australian Formula 1® Grand Prix event, in using the Reality Model to produce an immersive Virtual Reality experience for race attendees.

“We are excited to give everyone access to our latest innovation with an interactive demonstration on offer in the Industry & Innovation Precinct” says Mr. Cirillo.

The Precinct aims to showcase the latest in Australian ingenu ity and provide students and fans with further insight into the technology integral to the event. “We are very proud to be able to showcase our 3D Reality Model and hope that our VR innovation will inspire the next generation to a career in the spatial sciences.”

Information provided by Taylors. For further information, contact Taylors at enquiries@taylorsds.com.au. ■ www.spatialsource.com.au 17

feature

Saving lives with location DANIEL BISHTON

I

n 1854, a physician named John Snow was called upon to investigate a cholera outbreak that was decimating the London district of Soho. Prevailing logic in the medical community attributed the means of transmission to ‘miasma’, a hazily-defined airborne pathogen thought to be released by decomposing organic material. A detailed, elegant and widely-accepted theory, it failed to inform any meaningful intervention in the outbreak, and Snow didn’t accept it as the cause – arguing that oral transmission was most likely.

The actions that followed have led John Snow to be dubbed the first epidemiologist. Struggling to convince the medical establishment of his theory, Snow deepened his investigation and turned to a powerful, disruptive technology to test his hypothesis – he made a map. With infections and deaths plotted, Snow was able to demonstrate

that cholera cases were clustered around a water pump, now famously known as the ‘Broad street pump’. While he wasn’t able to detect any organic material in the pump’s well, Snow was able to make a critical intervention from his data – he removed the pump’s handle, and the cascade of cases was halted.

His methods would have profound impacts on the field of epidemiology, and his germ-based model of disease transmission, in part proven by his stunning intervention in Soho, eventually became widely accepted by the 1860s.

In 2018, most countries in the world are lagging behind their targets for healthrelated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN’s development agenda for 2030. The UN’s second baseline assessment on SDG progress released in September 2016 found that less than five percent of countries worldwide were on track to meet targets for key public health issues, including tuberculosis, road deaths, suicide and obesity.

Whilst John Snow’s ground-breaking analysis and intervention informed the course of contemporary epidemiology, the blistering pace of technological development and access to spatial data has opened new vistas for public health research, policy and GIS analysis alike.

Dr. Neil Coffee is one of a small set of GIS innovators in Australia, pushing the envelope of health research and location’s place within it. As associate professor of the Centre for Research and Action in Public Health (CeRAPH) at the University of Canberra, he is establishing Australia’s first tertiary course on geo-health, and is currently overseeing a set of projects that interrogate how location data can inform medical interventions and policy positions that lead to real, measurable positive health outcomes – both within and outside of Australia.

One core research interest for Dr. Coffee is the influence of environmental factors on health outcomes. That is, how factors related the built environment and socio-economic development patterns can combine to create liveability conditions that may have a profound impact on lifestyles of their residents, specifically how these factors can affect lifestyle-driven health burdens such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity.

Dr. Coffee doesn’t mince words on the importance of location in fully understanding the burden of disease.

“Health is one of the biggest spends now for government and it's getting out of control, because of the rapid increase in the prevalence of chronic diseases not just in Australia – but across the world,” he said.

“It isn't enough just to know the particular prevalence of cardiovascular disease in Australia. It doesn't help us focus that funding, it doesn't help us focus on a particular location where we find there's an incredibly high prevalence of cardiovascular disease relative to other places. The only way to understand these things is through the use of spatial. If we know both the extent, the location – and the location with the extent that's relative to it – we can actually identify areas where we get a better outcome from the spend of our dollars,” he said.

A flagship undertaking in this area is a new partnership focused on geo-health between the University John Snow’s 1854 map of cholera cases in Soho, London that demonstrated spatial clustering of cases around the ‘Broad street pump’.

18 position February/March 2018

The modifiable areal unit problem can significantly alter outcomes.

of Canberra and the Dasman Diabetes Institute (DDI), tackling a specific, thorny public health concern – the alarming prevalence of type 2 diabetes in Kuwait.

Dr. Coffee and his team are building a geo-health data lab in Kuwait, within which they plan to study the variability in the disease’s prevalence in the country, and to analyse and isolate locationspecific factors that may contribute.

DDI approached the CeRAPH team, and the two entities now have an Memorandum of Understanding for a four-year, multimillion dollar partnership and project.

“They recognised that the spatial dimension was something they needed to understand as well. They know the extent of the problem in Kuwait, but they know nothing about how that's actually distributed – is it the same everywhere or are there major areas? Because interventions at the whole population level only have limited success,” Dr. Coffee said.

Once the geo-health centre is established, a local team will be trained and the datasets will be built up, including location of services and health facilities, roads and infrastructure, demographic data and a population monitor tool that will help the team carry out randomised interviews.

“We’ll ask them questions about their health behaviours, so that we can start to establish norms of behaviours for different areas, that we can then start to associate with the health data, and the health environment,” Dr. Coffee said.

The CeRAPH team has a range of operational Australian projects currently, including an initiative to

Dr. Neil Coffee.

create a liveability index for remote Indigenous communities. However, in the Australian context, Dr. Coffee finds that a persistent barrier often prevents the team conducting the type of analysis that they will be conducting in Kuwait: access to adequately detailed spatial data.

“The main issue for us is the ability to use inner record data at the address level – the actual address level. To really make sense of patterns of health, that's the level we need to be doing the analysis at,” Dr. Coffee said.

The team frequently finds their research constrained by lack of access to address-level data on privacy grounds – even if they will not be publishing results in that level of detail. The potential for reidentification of individuals is oft-cited as the basis for withholding data sufficiently granular for detailed spatial analysis.

“If we're talking about having anonymized data – we do, but we also have the street address, the argument is that we've now got the capacity for reidentification, and that's quite valid. Now there are ways of randomly perturbing those data spatially in the same way as we would randomly perturb a table of data like the ABS do. But we haven't really reached a point with Australian data providers where there's a level of comfort in the capability that this will in fact protect confidentiality,” he said.

“We need somehow to get them to be comfortable with the fact that we can take record data at the street level and randomly perturb it spatially such that it doesn't enable identification – but it does enable us to identify the real patterns.”

Most health, demographic and socioeconomic data in Australia are aggregated to the statistical areas used in the and local government areas (LGAs), and this low level of resolution can cause measured outcomes to be subject to the modifiable areal unit problem, which says that both the strength and direction of a statistical association can be manipulated by the way an area is divided.

“Many of those spatial units are very large so they don't really give us any true understanding of what's happening internally, distribution-wise. They ignore the fact that some of the issues that we might identify are actually occurring on the borders of two spatial units, and therefore we're seeing patterns across both that really are quite isolated to a particular location,” Dr. Coffee said.

“So what we often find in Australia with our analysis is that we're restricted by these spatial units that we know are impacting on the outcome in the first place.”

This issue is compounded by the fact that data is not always collected or managed consistently across jurisdictions, such as state departments. Dr. Coffee cites Scotland, New Zealand and Canada as best practice examples, with all available public data managed by a single national body, and individual-level data available for research purposes.

“Many other countries do quite detailed spatial analysis with data with far more availability than we have here in Australia. So we only need to look to some of the overseas examples the ways that we can improve the way data are provided,” he said. ■ www.spatialsource.com.au 19

feature

What’s in an address?

Position founding editor Jon Fairall explores some next-generation solutions to an age-old problem.

JON FAIRALL

C

hris Sheldrick used to be in the music business. Specifically, he was the guy you phoned when you were arranging a band for a wedding. He enjoyed managing bands, but Chris had a problem.

“It wasn’t what you might think,” he said. ”It wasn’t illegal streaming or downloads. It was people getting lost.

Every day, there would be phone calls because the addresses people put into their smartphones didn’t get them there, or they couldn’t find a specific entrance.

“So our solution was to appoint a person whose job was to be the guy you phoned when you thought you had arrived – but you hadn’t.”

It worked, but Chris knew there had to be a better way.

That impulse was the genesis of a business that may yet change the way we think about location. Together with Jack Waley-Cohen, Mohan Ganesalingam, and Michael Dent, he founded a company called what3words in July 2013, based in London.

His bright idea was to divide the entire surface of the globe into a grid of 57 trillion (million billion) squares, each measuring three metres by three metres. He gave each

20 position February/March 2018

square a three-word name. The words are made up from a database of 40,000 words, giving 64 trillion possible combinations.

The three words are generated by an algorithm that runs on the local device and can be embedded in other applications. So, for instance, the front door of the building where this magazine is prepared is at ‘other.shakes.prop’. The algorithm favours the shortest words in regions of high population density.

The what3words system is not hierarchical. So ‘other.shakes.pub’ is not next to ‘other.shakes.prop’. In fact, to the extent that the words are ordered at all, it is that any three words that could be mistaken or mistyped are so far away that when mistakes are made, they are easy to spot. So, for instance, ‘other.snake.prop’ is north of Kingston, Jamaica and ‘other. shame.prop’ is just outside Mumbai, India.

The app is available in different languages, so if you happen to be a German backpacker working for a courier company, you might be more comfortable making a delivery to this magazine at ‘walder.neutrale.beschreiben’. This is not a translation of the English address, but three random words chosen from a list of

German words. The actual translation of those three words into English would be forests.neutral.sketch, which is somewhere in the desert, north of Kalgoorlie.

As of December 2016, what3words addresses were available in Arabic and a number of African language as well as the key European languages. The company recently announced plans for 14 more.

By the end of this year, it wants to offer Chinese, Indonesian, Zulu, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi.

This might seem like an impossibly complicated solution to a trivial problem.

But it’s worth noting that some very astute people have thrown serious money at what3words.

In January 2108, German carmaker Daimler took a 10 percent stake in the company. This will complement an earlier investment in Nokia’s Here digital mapping technology.

A Daimler press release says the company will roll out what3words in the next model of its Mercedes A class, due out in the northern hemisphere’s Spring.

What3words is privately held, so the dollar value of this investment is difficult to determine, but the public record shows

LEFT: The majority of the world’s population still lives in dwellings much like this: an unnumbered house on an unnamed dirt track.

RIGHT: Chris Sheldrick, CEO and co-founder of what3words. Chris managed bands before he had a catalytic idea.

that the company raised $13.6 million by December 2016, including an $8.5 million investment by Intel Capital and other British investors.

The largest investor is Dubai-based logistics company, Aramex. In June 2016, Australia Post announced that it had agreed to form a joint venture with the company. Under the terms of the agreement, Australia Post and Aramex will establish AGS in Singapore to target the global eCommerce market. AusPost will take a 40 percent stake in the company.

Much of the commercial enthusiasm for what3words comes down to the fact that it seems to work. Aramex recently tested the technology in Dubai. It gave its drivers guidance via either what3words or conventional addressing to a hundred destinations. The company says that drivers took 7 hours 39 minutes to make all their deliveries using conventional addresses; they drove 255 kilometres and made 25 phone calls to ask for directions. Using what3words to make the same deliveries took 4 hours 28 minutes. Drivers drove 198 kilometres and made no calls for directions.

Overall, that is a 22 percent increase in productivity, according to the company.

But Dubai does not have a system of street addresses. On its face, Australia has a perfectly good address system already, based on street names and numbers.

In most of the English-speaking world, addresses have been in common use since the 18th century, based on ordering the address information in a hierarchy, starting from the street and street number, the town, state or province and, at the broadest level, the country. Streets have names and the houses on the street are numbered in a consistent fashion, making them easy to find. At the end of the last century it became fashionable to add a postcode to the address to aid automated sorting.

So, why should citizens of first-world countries be interested? For most of us, street addresses are so much a part of

For a visitor, this is frustrating. For a business operator, it can be a show stopper. Without accurate, predictable and unambiguous addressing, handling logistics is difficult – if not impossible.

Even worse, without a way of identifying a property, security of title and tenure – and the tsunami of problems that follow in its absence can become major issues.

This much has been recognised by all those with an interest in developing economies. Much work has been done in the last few decades to develop practical addressing systems. But a brief look at reports from the Universal Postal Union, the United Nations body that coordinates the movement of postal items internationally, demonstrates that establishing a national street-based address system is non-trivial. It’s expensive

Fundamentally, the problem isn’t really about addresses – it’s about obtaining a geocode. daily life that we scarcely give them a second thought. But contact with another country gives one pause. Street addresses can quickly become incomprehensible to a foreigner. Could you deliver a parcel to: vul: Centraĺnaja; d 20, v. Karalistavičy 223016, p/a Novy Dvor, Minskaha r-na, Minskaj vobl: Belarus?

And Belarus, like almost all parts of the developed world, has streets with names and numbers. In most of the Middle East, Africa and many parts of Asia and Latin America, names are reserved only for the biggest roads and the most important homes. Navigating these streets to a destination depends entirely on local knowledge.

and most addressing projects take decades before they are part of common usage.

In the last decade, Costa Rica, Peru, Ecuador, Saudi Arabia and Mongolia have all undertaken addressing programs that attempt to create, from scratch, some variation of the standardised address scheme used in the English-speaking world.

They have all encountered problems.

The schema assumes that all houses can be defined in relation to a street, but this is not always so. One of the most interesting examples of this in recent times has been in South Africa.

South Africa has a perfectly functional address system, essentially identical to that used in Australia. However, in 2007, ▶ www.spatialsource.com.au 21

feature LEFT: What3words’ user interface.

Kiribilli House’s what3words address is allows.being.ride.

BELOW: The interior of the new Mercedes Benz A class will contain a map display that allows entry of three-word addresses.

Statistics South Africa reported that of 13.2 million households, almost eight million did not have an address. In the majority of these cases, the house block did not abut onto a street. Most such houses are in rural villages.

From 2005 to 2009, the South African Post Office ran a project to give four million rural households an address, but at the cost of introducing eleven different address types. Some of them are quite free-flowing. “Opposite the butcher shop, Tsamaya Street, Mamelodi” is a legitimate address, but it must represent a geocoding problem of some complexity.

Lebanon has spent over a decade in an attempt to establish an address system based on street names and house numbers. Khalil Daoud, the chair and managing director of LibanPost, the postal service provider in Lebanon, says: “Postal services continued to rely on locals to deliver mail to households based on somewhat arbitrary knowledge about who lives where.” Residents use landmarkbased references to identify their homes, such as ‘beside the hospital’ and ‘in front of the school’. As a result, Daoud has licensed the Universal Address System to modernise Lebanon’s postal services.

In Mongolia, what3words is now part of the official address descriptor. It is ideal because many people are nomadic for at least part of the year. Moreover, even when people stay in one place, they don’t pitch their tents on a road. Even if they do, there is no guarantee that road will have a name.

It’s possible to fix these problems, of course – but only with the application of large amounts of money, expertise, planning, time and political goodwill.

Meanwhile, the country pays the price.

Geovanni Campos, the postal distribution director at Correos de Costa Rica, told

22 position February/March 2018

a recent conference that the lack of a comprehensive address system costs his country US$720 million a year. That's in a nation of 4.4 million inhabitants which can ill-afford the waste.

But this is not just an issue for developing-world economies. In 2015, the Cooperative Research Centre looked at the issue of innovative address methodologies and concluded that Australia’s geocoded address data is deficient in a number of areas. It’s not cost-efficient. It has significant ambiguity – insofar as one property can have several address descriptors, and one address can refer to several entities. It’s not updated often enough to meet the expectations of users. It can’t identify non-property-based locations. It is not designed to support emerging user requirements.

Fundamentally, the problem isn’t really about addresses – it’s about obtaining a geocode. For human beings, a predictable system based on street numbering aided by landmarks is an excellent method of navigating urban space. “Turn left at the Post Office, right at the bridge and then it’s number 37”, is an exact and succinct way of directing someone.

But modern logistics has a subtly different set of demands. System designers cannot assume drivers have local

knowledge. Drivers use computing devices to navigate. The device can reduce an address to a latitude/longitude coordinate of any desired accuracy, but only if it receives the right input. Seen in this light, an address is simply a component of the machine/human interface.

As a result, several other innovative approaches to location are emerging to give what3words some competition.

MapCode, Google’s Open Location Code, Natural Area Coding and Geepers are among the high-profile alternatives.

Moreover, the spatial industry is starting to notice. Esri released a what3words geocoder in 2017, so ArcGIS users can both generate three word addresses for any point and read those same words as an address point.

“Addressing just got easier,” said Jack Dangermond the company’s chief executive.

What3words has now been integrated into Hexagon’s Smart M.App platform and into Safe Software’s FME data transformation tool. There is a plug-in for QGIS, the open source GIS. It is also now a valid way of inputting addresses into route planning apps on smartphones. What3words has an app itself, but many other developers are including it in their offering. For instance, a user can use three words to specify Australian addresses in the TripGo App. At the same time, what3words is moving closer to the spatial industry. The company recently appointed Steven Ramage, formerly chief executive of the Open Geospatial Consortium and British land agency Ordnance Survey, as the company’s director of strategy. In a recent paper, Ramage noted what3words’ ability to consistently display the same unique address across all hardware and software platforms.

“It’s elegant in its simplicity,” he said.

It may well turn out that we don’t need to make a choice between addressing systems but rather, the issue is deciding on fitness for purpose. Streets numbers may well be an organic solution in some environments, but other systems may offer advantages, especially for professional drivers in industrial situations. This may prove to provide next-generation addressing systems a market, even in developed countries such as Australia.

Jon Fairall was the founding editor of Position magazine, and now works as a freelance journalist and author. ■

feature

GDA2020: a progress update MICHAEL GIUDICI

T

his time last year, I provided an overview of the reasons Australia was moving to a new datum, GDA2020. Since then, a large amount of technical work has been occurring, and all Australian jurisdictions have been gearing up for the change.

In October last year, the National Measurement Institute (NMI) formally gazetted GDA2020 as The project the Recognised Value Standard of considered how an Measurement of Position, meaning Earth-fixed datum will be GDA2020 officially replaced GDA94 accommodated in spatial as Australia’s new datum. technology. Several Senator the Hon Matt Canavan, global spatial technology Minister for Resources and powerhouses are working Northern Australia, noted in a hard on this problem, December media release that and plan to include the the first update to Australia’s ICSM Chair and transformation tools in mapping coordinate reference Tasmania’s Surveyor future releases. These frame for more than two decades General Michael Giudici. players, and the open has moved Australia’s coordinates approximately 1.8 metres to the northeast. source community, are also aware of the need for a consistent lexicon dealing with “This movement is significant when it Reference Frames. They are aware of the comes to applications that rely on highly need to develop greater awareness of the accurate positioning, such as precision nature of Reference Frames and Datums agriculture, the emerging intelligent and how they are treated. Similarly, transport sector, mobile location the PROJ.4 library, the projection and based services and automated mining transformation engine used by the majority operations,” he said.

The technical work on the development of open source spatial software and web services globally, is being updated to of the national NTv2 distortion grids accommodate Earth-fixed datums. is complete and the grids are available At the ICSM Datum modernisation online. This has been a major complex implementation team meeting held in technical achievement involving all the Melbourne in August, I made the point jurisdictions and Geoscience Australia. that we have reached a natural transition The release of the transformation tools stage for this national project. Most has meant that CORS providers and stakeholders have stopped asking ‘why?’, software houses can now concentrate and instead are asking, ‘how?’ and ‘when?’ their efforts on assessing the integration Furthermore, as the delivery of technical of parameters into their products. It is transformation products occurs, the focus expected that these processes will be will shift from the underpinning geodesy commencing over the next few months to the management of spatial data.

Another major body of work has This isn’t unique to Australia. The been an assessment of the legislative U.S. new datums program is the most and administrative implications of well documented international instance adopting GDA2020 and ultimately the of datum modernisation similar to that Australian Terrestrial Reference Frame. being undertaken in Australia. The The report on this project, jointly funded National Geodetic Survey held its now by the Cooperative Research Centre bi-annual Geospatial Summit in April, for Spatial Information and ICSM, presenting updates on the planned move was accepted by ICSM in August 2017. from the North American Datum of 1983 While the full report was not prepared and North American Vertical Datum for public release, key findings will be of 1988. This modernisation will allow communicated in a simple format.

Courtesy of Geoscience Australia.

for the adoption of time-dependent horizontal and vertical reference frames in 2022. During the summit, presenter Dave Doyle remarked that unlike previous datum modernisation efforts, this time there was a huge user group from multiple stakeholder communities (not just the spatial community) “sitting on mountains of high accuracy data”.

In anticipation of an increased requirement for information products, ICSM has been preparing new fact sheets, called “Datum Matters”. At the date of writing, 5 fact sheets have been completed and are available on the ICSM datum pages. Additional fact sheets are under preparation and will be made available as they become available. These are aimed at those requiring simple explanations of datum issues, and are useful to hand out to clients and users who need to know there are changes happening.

For those who require detailed technical information such as transformation parameters and distortion grids, the GDA2020 Technical Manual is also available on the ICSM and Geoscience Australia Websites. We have also set up an online forum where interested parties can submit question that will be addressed by subject matter experts that range across the fields of use.

I encourage everyone to visit the ICSM website and review the latest information which is being progressively updated. There will be a special GDA2020 forum at Locate 18 in Adelaide in April, during which a further demonstration of technical and implementation matters will be discussed. I look forward to meeting many of you there.

Michael Giudici is chair of the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping, and the Surveyor-General of Tasmania. ■ www.spatialsource.com.au 23

9-11 April 2018, AdelAide, AustrAliA

theme: the Art science and Business of Geospatial

Asia-Pacific’s most premier conferences, GeoSmart Asia and Locate are joining hands to come together in Adelaide, Australia, from 9-11 April 2018. With the theme ‘The Art, Science and Business of Geospatial’, the conference aims to highlight technology advancements in the geospatial industry and discuss the solution-centric applications that would result in new business models. These new business models will help in defining a roadmap for the geospatial industry.

Since their inception, both GeoSmart Asia and Locate have been initiating dialogues and discussions for promotion of geospatial technologies across the region. The collaborative event will deliver a far-reaching, dynamic, and powerful experience for its attendees. Witness three days of insightful workshops, plenary and thematic sessions, social events, and exhibition displaying state-of-the-art technologies.

pArtners & sponsors GoLd SponSorS

principAL pArtnerS

www.geosmartasia.org

SiLver SponSor

MediA pArtner

Bronze SponSorS

StAkehoLderS

www.locateconference.com

Keynote speaKers

Flavia tata nardini CEO, Fleet Space Australia

ed parsons

Cy Smith

Geospatial Technologist, Google, UK

Chief Geography officer, Oregon, USA

Peter Worthington Eyre

Chief Data Officer, South Australia, Australia

rebecca de cicco Maher Abdel karim professor elanor Huntington Director, Digital Node, Project manager, Public UK

Jerry Johnston Specialist Leader, Deloitte, USA

Dr. Este Geraghty

Chief Medical Officer & Authority for Civil Infor- Dean, Australian Nation- Health Solutions Direcmation, Kuwait tor, Esri, USA al University, Australia

Ben haines

Athlete Development Manager, South Australian National Football League, Australia

Laurent rivière CEO, Sunbirds, Australia

9 ApriL 2018

Market Day

13:45 hrs

Field Trips

17:00 hrs 18:00 hrs

Welcome Function Day Closes

08:45 - 11:00 hrs 11:00 - 11:45 hrs 11:45-13:15 hrs 13:15-14:15 hrs

Opening Plenary Morning Tea Break Keynotes Lunch

11 ApriL 2018

10:00 hrs

10 ApriL 2018

programme agenda

14:15-15:30 hrs

Breakout Sessions

15:30-16:00 hrs

Afternoon Tea Break

16:00-17:15 hrs

Breakout Sessions

18:15-23:00 hrs

Pre Dinner Drinks APSEA Gala Dinner

09:00-10:40 hrs

Breakout Sessions

10:40 - 11:10 hrs

Morning Tea Break

11:10-12:25 hrs

Breakout Sessions

12:25-13:25 hrs

Lunch

13:25-14:40 hrs

Breakout Sessions

14:40-15:10 hrs 15:10-17:10 hrs 17:10 hrs 17:30 hrs

Afternoon Tea Break Closing Plenary Formal Closing Closed

Exhibition Hall Open Penfolds Winery (Agriculture)

SAHMRI Tonsley Innovation (Health & Communities) (Energy & Innovation)

Workshops

Smart Cities

Disaster Management

Geo-science for Energy Sector

Smart Cities

The Right Location

Integrating GDA2020 into The Science of Business as Usual Geospatial

The Art of Communication

Remote Sensing

Big Data

Health & Community

UAV for Busienss

Surveying II

Workshop

Location Intelligence II

Agri-Business

Science of Smart Cites

GIS in Government & Policy

Surveying II

Workshop

Geo-Solutions for Utilities

Future Thinkers

Location Intelligence III

Innovation in Geospatial Surveying II

Location Intelligence I

Artificial Intelligence

Surveying I

Seminar Interactive Zone Theatre Seminar Interactive Zone Theatre

Interactive Zone Theatre Seminar Interactive Zone Theatre Seminar Interactive Zone Theatre Interactive Zone Closed

Refer to the conference website for more details

interAction zone

GeoSmart Asia – Locate 18 will offeri an opportunity for everyone to explore answers to some of the biggest questions facing the industry! Hosted by the newly-launched Spatial LabX360, the Interaction Zone will feature two dynamic spaces for delegates & speakers, sponsors & exhibitors to have interactive discussions and tackle some big challenges!

www.geosmartasia.org

FieLd tripS

Learning, networking and excitement at GeoSmart Asia – Locate 18 are not limited to indoors!

The event will offer 3 post-conference field trips on Monday 9 April 2018. Each tour will show the current and future technological developments in the following sectors: Health and Community; Agriculture; Energy and Science.

Avail early bird discounts before Feb 28!

reGister now www.locateconference.com

q&a

Flavia Tata Nardini A

s co-founder and CEO of one of Australia’s most exciting space startups, Fleet, Flavia Tata Nardini and her team are preparing to launch 100 nanosatellites into space, which Fleet will use to ‘connect billions of sensors to track and change industries and ecologies across the globe.’

A former propulsion test engineer at the European Space Agency, project manager at TNO and co-founder of Launchbox, Flavia has worked across a broad range of innovative space projects, from micropropulsion systems for CubeSats to space debris removal systems, experience that directly informs Fleet’s rapid progress towards their goal, as they prepare for their first two launches later this year. Flavia sat down for this exclusive interview with Position ahead of her keynote at Locate ’18 – Geosmart Asia ’18.

Fleet recently won a $500m grant from the South Australian government to establish a mission control centre for nanosatellites – congratulations! What will this mean for Fleet’s goals for 2025, and Australia’s space industry more broadly?

At Fleet, we are thrilled to have been awarded the Future Jobs Fund grant from the South Australian government to build a mission control centre in Adelaide. We are putting South Australia on the map as a space hub. The Mission Control South Australia project is a tremendous step forward to support our local space industry, creating 17 full-time jobs in IT and advanced manufacturing.

As we prepare to deploy the first of our constellation of 100 nanosatellites this year, the mission control centre at Fleet’s Adelaide headquarters will be critical to our Australian and global operations.

26 position February/March 2018

Australia’s local space industry is buzzing. The mission control centre highlights the momentum, growth and commitment of government and industry to build a dynamic and ambitious space industry on Australian soil. It really is an exciting time to be a space business in South Australia!

Could you describe Fleet Space Technologies’ ultimate objective and the rationale for it?

At Fleet, we’re transforming the future of industries from space by launching a world-first constellation of nanosatellites to ubiquitously connect the world’s soonto-be-online 75 billion devices. Once live, this network will create a digital nervous system that covers the planet, creating a world more connected than ever before.

The world is facing some huge challenges in the coming years: we live in an era of exponential population growth, increasing environmental challenges and rapid resource depletion.

The constellation of nanosatellites will power the next industrial revolution, giving businesses new access to data and connectivity, so that many of these issues can be solved.

What are the key ways that you see the ‘Internet of Things’ and use of connected devices in changing the way we live and work? Which industries are poised to reap the benefits first?

Space technology is on the verge of revolutionising nearly every facet of life as we know it. The future of connected

devices will transform how businesses operate across industries in all corners of the globe, from helping businesses find new and efficient ways of working; monitoring environmental challenges; and embedding new technologies and instantaneous data into our personal daily activities.

The next industrial revolution will change the way businesses operate forever, the applications of connected devices are endless from precision agriculture and virtual fences to maritime safety in the Indian Ocean, and even logistics management.

I’m interested to hear your interpretation of the term ‘geospatial culture’ – what does it mean to you, and how are your activities with Fleet contributing to evolving it?

Geospatial culture is transforming how we understand the world, operate our businesses and look to solve global challenges. The advancements we’re witnessing in geospatial technologies, across the world, are critical to Fleet’s operations as geospatial information lays at the heart of applications for connected devices.

How does the spatial industry, and more precisely your activities serve some of the key industries and verticals that stand to benefit from a more connected world?

We’ll be able to instantaneously monitor the progress of food production at a factory, then track its journey to the store, and follow its transition to shelves.

SPECIALISTS IN PORTABLE MAPPING SYSTEMS

This frequently-updated and precise information will increase operational efficiencies by minimising waste and monitoring product life cycles.

Environmental monitoring will be completely transformed by the future of connected devices as we monitor coral depletion in the world’s vast oceans; analyse tree regeneration in the Amazon; and track the world’s rising sea temperatures impacting extreme weather events.

Space is the next frontier for industries across the globe. The future of connected devices will enable businesses to look to the stars to solve the world’s future challenges across spatial, mining, agriculture and defence industries, just to name a few.

What are some of the key benefits that the space industry can offer Australians?

Australia’s space industry is a flurry of activity, not since the days of Woomera have we seen the most ambitious minds across the nation pull together to help solve the world’s future problems from space. Following the news of the establishment of a national space agency last year, Australia is cementing itself as a space hub with over 60 startups readying themselves to tackle the next frontier with the most innovative technologies.

As momentum for our local space industry continues to build, we’re witnessing the potential for enormous economic growth, exciting career opportunities in STEM and can inspire the next generation of Australians to look to the stars for their future. ■

CONTACT Erron 0447 440 234 Max 0428 501 887

➤ Bases

in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Tasmania & Ballina ➤ Over 20 Years experience

aerialacquisitions.com.au www.spatialsource.com.au 27

feature

The mysterious art of cadastral land surveying I

’m not a registered/licensed land surveyor, but I am an educator. In my pursuit of teaching the next generation the wonderful world of surveying and geospatial information, I find myself having to give a broad overview of the noble art of cadastral surveying to students. Having recently attended numerous conferences focused more on the spatial world than surveying, I realised that an explainer about this mysterious art might be useful to a growing cohort of geospatial professionals.

The fundamental role of the professional cadastral surveyor is to reestablish existing property boundaries, as per the intent of the original surveyor.

This is extended to establishing new property boundaries as per new land development designs.

Let’s think about that for a moment.

The largest investment that most of us will ever make is in property. Imagine the farmer, who in 1888 met the surveyor on site and watched him place the boundary peg at the corner of his property. Ably assisted by his grandson, the farmer then replaces the peg with a brand new strainer post in exactly the spot where the peg came out. The surveyor also places a reference mark (maybe a metal pin, or a bottle or a blaze in a tree) just a few links from the strainer and shows it on their plan of survey. This reference mark provides evidence of the position of the boundary corner.

As the generations pass, the grandson inherits the property and passes it down the family line. As this farmer ages, so too does the strainer post. Five generations on, in 2018, the family decide they want to subdivide portions of their property and need a registered/licensed land surveyor to define the location of the boundary. Registered/licensed land surveyors are the only professionals who can legally redefine property boundaries.

Along comes the modern cadastral surveyor, with her brand new GNSS kit and robotic total station. She’s done a search on all the plans surrounding the property to help her redefine the original intention of the first surveyor to define the land. Therefore she must refer back to the plan from 1888. If she’s lucky, she’ll find the reference mark placed by the original

28 position February/March 2018

surveyor and after some checks she could simply re-establish the boundary – but there on the ground, after 130 years – the reference mark is gone. In fact, there is very little evidence of the boundary’s whereabouts at all. It’s not even clear which is the correct strainer post marking the corner. In urban surveys, this search for evidence is often compounded as reference marks such as drill holes and permanent marks often get destroyed.

But despite all the technology in the back of her truck, the modern surveyor is acutely aware of the hierarchy of evidence, often referred to as ’monuments over measurements’. Highest on the hierarchy are the original survey marks, but if they are gone then the surveyor refers to occupation, in this case, the strainer post. If such evidence is hard to find, the surveyor uses the dimensions on the plan and makes some assumptions in the field as to what constitutes boundary evidence, either on the property or on neighbouring properties – and so the exploration begins. Some surveyors place

1 link = 0.201268 metres. This is an old surveying measurement unit. 100 links = chain. 1 chain road = 20.12m wide.

Perhaps you’ve seen a one chain road on a country drive.

more emphasis on dimensions than the pure hierarchy rules specify, and usually consider each distance or angle, not just a transformation of a lot boundary.

Back to our case study, and there could have been other more modern surveys on neighbouring properties in the intervening 130 years. These surveys might provide clues as to the alignment of the south boundary with the west boundary, for instance. Was the internal angle of the original survey preserved?

Is the road width correct and parallel – as per the original intention? If the surveyor finds two pieces of evidence in the field and measures between them and the measurement differs from the original plan dimensions, which is correct? The modern gear can measure a distance much more accurately, but this only applies if they are measuring between the original marks – and the original intention of the first surveyor should be preserved, even if they got it wrong. If different surveyors have tried to infer the original position of each corner from a variety of evidence over the period since the original survey, it is likely that subsequent surveyors will have different opinions about where the

corners are. It can be this aspect, rather than the quality of measurements, that causes the most complication.

The modern surveyor is acutely aware that if they pull out their brand new GNSS device and set out a coordinate that is not over the old strainer post – or what’s left of it – then the family will know that this bright young surveyor has got it wrong. The family know where their boundary should be, because they know the story that dates back to 1888.

And here’s the rub. In Surveying 101, I teach the concept of ‘working from the whole to the part’. That’s like geodesy. The International Terrestrial Reference Frame is the biggest ‘whole’ you can get and cascading down from this Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) network is the regional Asia Pacific Reference Frame (APREF), followed by the newly gazetted Australian Fiducial Network (AFN), which connects to the various jurisdictional networks and down to Permanent Marks (PM) and State Survey Marks (SSM) used by cadastral surveyors when required.

But cadastral surveying, by circumstance of evolution, ‘works from the part to the whole’ – for example, the outcome of court decisions, or a surveyor trying to avoid court conflicts and choosing the least harm. How well does this property align with the neighbouring property on all boundaries? It can be like a big jigsaw puzzle of land parcels, but because the pieces have been defined over two and a half centuries – by different surveyors, using different equipment and perhaps only aligning to the boundaries that their clients pay them to, the jigsaw looks a little like the dog has chewed it – it doesn’t always fit neatly. This is the skill of the modern registered/licensed land surveyor, to try to sort out these issues which have mounted up over so many years.

From the perspective of the geospatial professional, they want to create a database of all land parcels in their various jurisdictions. Indeed they have. It is called the Digital Cadastral Database (DCDB), but it is referred to as a ‘parcel fabric’. It carries no legal weight. Why? Because of the way it has been created. Initially, by digitising large scale plans, it might be 0.2 metres accurate in the cities and in remote rural areas – up to hundreds of metres out. Government authorities have been putting in herculean efforts to Some surveyors will put more time into trying to find all the evidence to solve the jigsaw, but if the client won’t pay for such a thoroughness, they might be restricted to a more limited survey.

improve the representation of the DCDB and aspiring to a survey-accurate cadastre, but even if this is achieved, fundamentally this is still a measurement and lowest on the hierarchy of evidence.

Cadastral surveyors don’t actually care where the land is in the geodetic reference network, rather where it is on the ground.

But that said, they love the various reference networks as they help to find evidence on the ground. GNSS is great for helping to locate the monument, but thereafter the position of the monument on the ground takes precedence.

We still live in a monumented cadastre.

Our farming family can walk outside and point to the strainer post that their ancestors placed, knowing that this is the extent of their land and the database coordinate must reflect this, not the other way around. Surveyors still look for reference marks first to redefine the boundary. If the dimensions do not agree, but the surveyor is convinced they have found the monument, then the vector shown on the original plan defines the boundary; monuments over measurements.

Further challenges arise for the geospatial professional because some survey plans do not close perfectly – that is, if you add up all the vector dimensions around a land parcel, when you come back to the starting point, it does not equal zero – there is misclose in the measurements. Surveyors are very comfortable with this contention as they know that no measurement is perfect, and as long as their misclose fits within the tolerances specified in regulations, everything is fine. For the geospatial professional, dealing with a computer program that requires perfect geometry and zero misclose, something has to give.

Databases cannot handle uncertainty.

This also does not consider the fact that survey plans show dimensions measured on the ground surface, yet coordinates attained from CORS networks are on the grid. If the surveyor is working

$5.7 trillion is locked up in residential real estate (Core Logic, 2016) on the central meridian of the zone, the difference between a grid and ground distance is 400ppm; which translates to a distance of 100 metres on the ground being equivalent to 99.96m on the grid.

If the job is at 1000 metres elevation, then the so-called combined scale factor inflates this discrepancy even further.

How do geospatial databases handle this extra complication?

Herein lies the challenge: when geodesy meets cadastral, when grid meets ground, when the surveyor and the geospatial professional try to combine their work, when the whole and the part must merge.

And this is where we are at now, in 2018. We are challenged by exciting new developments such as Cadastre2034, LandXML and ePlan, eGeodesy, 3D cadastres, BIM modelling, point clouds, RPA derived DEMs and datum modernisation. But for all this excitement and reaching toward a utopian digital future, fundamental land equity must not be compromised to accommodate a new technology. Our economy relies on a stable system of land tenure and it is registered/licensed land surveyors who are charged with preserving the integrity of the cadastre. It is not impossible to combine these two schools of thought – but we must respect each other’s expertise and work together to achieve a workable solution. Let’s keep talking.

Dr. Craig Roberts is a Senior Lecturer in Surveying and Geospatial Engineering at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW. Colleagues Dr. Bruce Harvey, also senior lecturer at UNSW and registered land surveyor and Peter Baxter, registered land surveyor and member of the Board of Surveying and Spatial Information, are warmly acknowledged for their valuable feedback. ■ www.spatialsource.com.au 29

20 MARCH 2018 | SOFITEL BRISBANE CENTRAL

Extreme Weather Australia is about mitigating and managing the potentially catastrophic impacts of extreme weather and climate change on vital infrastructure, as well as crucial social infrastructure such as health and education.

It will cover the full range of life, property and business-threatening extreme weather events, from flood, subsidence and landslip, to drought and extreme winds.

It is aimed at those public, commercial and financial organisations with responsibility for designing, planning, funding and constructing resilient and adaptable urban infrastructure and related early warning and management systems.

REGISTER NOW Visit www.xtremeweather.com.au or contact Raj Anand on +61 (0)2 8586 6173 or email info@xtremeweather.com.au Media Partners

CONFERENCE PROGRAM - REGISTER NOW 8.30 - 9.00

REGISTRATION

9.00 - 10.30

Facing the Challenges of Extreme Weather and Climate Change in Australia Welcome Opening Address Dr Christine Williams, Acting Queensland Chief Scientist Climate change and extreme weather events in Australia Professor David Karoly, Leader, NESP Climate Change Hub, CSIRO Advances in forecasting, diagnosing and communicating high-impact weather events Dean Sgarbossa, Science Support Meteorologist - Extreme Weather Desk, Bureau of Meteorology Icons at Risk: Climate Change Threatening Australian Tourism Dr Martin Rice, Head of Research, Climate Council Q&A SESSION

10.30 - 11.00

MORNING TEA

11.00 - 12.30

Future-proofing: delivering resilience in the face of climate uncertainty Response, recovery and adaptation in a flood-affected community Cr David McLachlan, Chair for Environment, Parks and Sustainability, Brisbane City Council Disaster Risk Reduction: An International Overview Peter Walton, Director - International, Australian Red Cross Climate change adaptation and building a climate resilient community Professor Jean Palutikof, Director, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility Reducing the financial burden of disasters on the economy by planning ahead Jonathan Barratt, Chief Executive Officer, Celsius Pro (Australia) Q&A SESSION

12.30 - 1.15

LUNCH

1.15 - 3.00

Connecting The Dots: Extreme Weather, Climate Change and the Community Managing the risks of climate variability and extremes in Australian Agriculture Verity Morgan-Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer, Farmers for Climate Action Is your community resilient? Guidelines for natural hazard resilience in the built environment Maisie Auld, Environmental Economist, Edge Environment Critical Decade: The latest climate science and impacts. How to communicate effectively to different audiences PANEL SESSION Moderator: Dr Martin Rice, Head of Research, Climate Council Panellists: Professor Karen Hussey, Director - Centre for Policy Futures, University of Queensland Professor Hilary Bambrick, Head of the School of Public Health and Social Work, Queensland University of Technology Dr Andrew King, Climate Extremes Research Fellow, School of Earth Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Melbourne Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, Senior Climate Scientist, University of New South Wales

3.00 - 3.30

AFTERNOON TEA

3.30 - 5.05

Disaster Management: Interconnecting Resilience, Response & Recovery The role of military response in addressing climate change induced extreme weather events Admiral Chris Barrie (Ret.) - Former Chief of the Australian Defence Force The impact of extreme weather and climate variability in a regional community Cr Paul Antonio, Mayor, Toowoomba Regional Council Stories from the frontline: Using location-based technologies to manage disaster response Mark Wallace, Public Safety and Response Industry Specialist, Esri Australia Cross Border collaborations Disaster Management in the Digital Age Q&A SESSION CLOSING REMARKS

feature conform to international standards – without requiring any manual input.

Below we’ll walk through the key stages of processing that our technology performs automatically.

Step 1: Structuring point clouds

HANDS OFF: from scan to model with full automation MOHSEN KALANTARI, STEVEN CHAU, DON WITHANAGE

D

emand for Building Information Modelling (BIM) services is growing ferociously, with the worldwide demand projected to reach a value of $US18.8 billion by 2024. Demand for BIM services within the surveying and spatial industries is also expanding as BIM suites begin to integrate more tightly with geographic information systems (GIS). Applications of BIM within these industries are many and varied, but usually include scanning existing buildings and infrastructure facilities with LiDAR, then modelling the scans into 3D objects in BIM-compliant formats.

Completing the scanning is just the first part of the story, and can often be completed much more quickly than the modelling phase. An average single storey residential building can be scanned in around half a day, and using an appropriate computation setting, a registered point cloud produced in a couple of hours. More cumbersome and monotonous is the process of converting registered point clouds into models compliant with standards used in architecture, engineering, construction and urban planning sectors.

This is a time-consuming process.

Operators need to trace over the

32 position February/March 2018

individual components of the buildings such as walls, doors and windows to model their geometry. Some software solutions provide some level of automation to facilitate the geometric modelling of the building components.

For example, planar surfaces are recognised automatically, so the modelling of planar surfaces such as walls are undertaken more quickly.

After the basic geometry is modelled, the components need to be enriched by adding attributes such as type and thickness of walls.

An automatic solution Over the last two years, the authors have investigated this workflow, aiming to develop a fully automated solution for converting scans into BIM-compliant models, so as to remove the manual processing and intervention needed in the modelling step. We analysed the current practices and various workflows associated with currently available software solutions, and their underlying techniques. Based on the findings of the study, we have designed and developed an automatic technology that takes point clouds of building interiors and converts them into 3D models that

Point clouds generated through the laser scanning process can be either unstructured or structured. In unstructured point clouds, the spatial relationship between points representing real-world objects is not reflected in the structure of the file that contains the point cloud. A comparison with raster models aids understanding here. Raster data models define the spatial proximity of values by using a regular grid, in which the same number of columns and rows are used to store the values in each cell.

Unstructured point clouds can be stored in an array that has millions of columns and only one row.

To be able to process point cloud data efficiently and extract information from it, it is essential to structure the data.

Spatial proximity operators and analysis are vastly more effective and efficient on structured data. For instance, ‘nearest neighbour’ analysis methods – to analyse variation of the density of the points over a particular space – will execute far more efficiently on structured data than they will on unstructured data. In the structured data, the space for performing specific processes can be delimited, while with unstructured data, it is necessary to process all of the points sequentially.

Step 2: Filtering

As with any measurement device, sensors that generate point clouds may present noise and outliers as false points.

Noises and outliers are generated by a combination of many factors, including the type and design of the LiDAR sensor, scanning conditions and the environment being scanned. Measurement errors, sudden motion of the sensor, geometrical discontinuities due to occlusions and varying densities across the scanned space are some of the sources contributing to the generation of false points.

Removing this noise and any errant outliers from the meaningful by filtering is essential for accurate, usable results.

Methods for filtering including techniques that consider density, distribution and depth of the points in certain clusters, distance between the points, or a combination of these factors. For instance, in distance-based methods, all points with mean distances are outside of an assumed distance mean and standard deviation are considered as outliers and removed from data.

Step 3: Recognition

After removing false points from clouds, point clouds are subdivided into clusters to extract building components from them. Depending on the level of detail required in a BIM, individual components are to be recognised. For example, in the case of a multi-storey building, each level must be recognised separately to extract the planar view of each storey before further details on each storey can be recognised, such as floors, ceilings, walls and doors.

There is a range of algorithms and techniques that can be used for segmenting and recognising components of the buildings. For example, to identify an object, statistical algorithms are provided with an input point cloud alongside a mathematical model of the object to be recognised. The model is then fitted to the different areas of a point cloud, as the degree of confidence in fitting is evaluated.

For example, to find a wall, the model of a plane is provided to the algorithms.

The algorithms make a subset of the given point cloud by randomly selecting a fixed number of points from the cloud.

They then calculate the coefficients of the shape which best fits the sample of points. Then, they check all the other points in the cloud against this model to separate the inliers and the outliers.

This consensus of the entire cloud to a model built from randomly selected points is recorded – an iterative process that is repeated several times. This yields a shape which has the highest consensus from all the random samples.

These algorithms are robust and return the best parameters, even when a significant portion of the dataset is outliers. In cases where the wall has a protruding section, or the ceiling has an elevated portion, the algorithm can find planes that fit most of that surface.

There are also machine learning methods that are used to recognise building components. In these methods, recognition systems are built, so objects are identified by learning from past recognition. In these approaches, models of building objects to be recognised are stored and labelled in an inventory called the classification database.

Then, algorithms that learn are used to recognise new examples of the building objects from the existing objects that are found in the database. For modelling buildings, the classification database is compiled and sourced from Computer Assisted Design (CAD) or BIM files. The existing models are also enriched by creating appropriate representations of building components by a human

IFC-compliant(left) and CityGMLcompliant(right) model built automatically from scanned output.

operator. In the clustering and extraction process, if a feature is recognised that fits an object in the database, it is then added to a training dataset so the algorithms can learn from the new addition. Then the addition is inserted into the classification database for future use. If the objects are not recognised a manual classification is undertaken, and the result is added to the classification database.

Once a group of points is recognised as an object, all points that lie on this object are kept, and the remaining points are discarded. As a result, at the end of this step, a set of known objects represented by point-clouds are stored.

Step 4: Modelling

After the objects are recognised, they are converted into appropriate geometric objects and structured into the required format. For example, after a cluster of points is recognised as a wall, a convex hull algorithm is used to compute a surface representing the wall by giving the extreme values of the edges in the point clusters. Also, to extract the wall thickness, point clouds taken from both sides of the wall are needed. If the points cloud represents the complete interior of a building, the thickness of all the interior walls can be modelled.

Step 5: Implementation

We’ve successfully implemented this workflow, by which point clouds of building interiors are automatically processed, and architectural components including ceiling, wall, door, windows and openings are automatically recognised, extracted and converted into semanticallyenriched 3D model in two international data standards: CityGML and IFC.

“This process can be up to 100 times faster than the manual process, with a relative discrepancy modelling accuracy between 2 and 5 percent.”

This implementation can also automatically generate floor plans in planar views. Our research indicates that, depending on the level of detail expected in the 3D model, this process can be up to 100 times faster than the manual process, with a relative discrepancy modelling accuracy between 2 and 5 percent. This has the potential to greatly increase the productivity of surveying and architecture industries in generating BIM and 3D models.

This technology is now commercially available through Faramoon, a startup supported by Translating Research at Melbourne (TraM), a program designed to accelerate commercial insight for researchers at the University of Melbourne. Faramoon is also sponsored by a City of Melbourne (CoM) startup grant to support the integration of the technology to a cloud-based infrastructure to provide this technology outside Australia. The technology is licensed to Faramoon from the University of Melbourne.

Mohsen Kalantari is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Director at the Centre for SDIs and Land Administration at the University of Melbourne, he can be reached at mohsen.kalantari@unimelb.edu.au. He is also a co-founder at Faramoon. Steven Chau and Don Withanage are fellow co-founders at Faramoon, and can be reached at hello@faramoon.io. ■ www.spatialsource.com.au 33

feature

Laying the foundation: UNSW builds geospatial research centre UNSW is banking on geospatial’s growth as it invests in a multidisciplinary geospatial research centre to centralise, standardise and distribute the data and project outputs of several of the university’s key faculties. Amply qualified for the project is Professor Sisi Zlatanova, who has joined UNSW from Zelft Technical University in The Netherlands, and is eager to flex her muscles on this ambitious, undertaking.

DANIEL BISHTON

S

isi Zlatanova has been making maps from a tender age. As a child under ten, she joined her father in his 4x4, a surveyor and cartographer in the Republic of Bulgaria, as he plotted and planned the path of highways through remote and mountainous regions. By 14, she was taking down measurements from her father’s theodolite on these excursions, and her course was set.

As of January 2018, Professor Zlatanova is newly Sydney-based and hard at work, establishing a project which has the potential to bear considerable fruit for many of UNSW’s technical research teams, and the Australian geospatial community as a whole. Sisi has been tasked with setting up the university’s new geospatial information centre, a strategic and bold move from the university that recognises the power and rapidly growing ubiquity of spatial data and services.

34 position February/March 2018

While one of the centre’s proposed projects to create fully standardscompliant 3D models of Sydney’s CBD has piqued interest, the designs that Zlatanova has in mind for the centre’s purpose within the UNSW research community is where the project’s enduring value lies.

“All the faculties realised that there is an increasing need for geospatial information, but everybody was working strictly within their own specific discipline,” she told Position.

“I quickly realised there’s a need to have some kind of hub where data, equipment, knowledge, even projects – can be shared to speed up the research and reuse the resources that are available and being created within the university. There are a lot of data sets that just ‘float’ here at the university, and I intend to build a repository where all the data that can be shared by the whole university are going to be located here.”

The implications of this development to supercharge the output of a number of UNSW’s key faculties should not be underestimated. Faculties for the built environment, computer science and engineering, electrical engineering, civil and environmental engineering are all on board, as well as the school of aviation – meaning that the centre can use their light aircraft to conduct their own aerial surveys, and use the new data to flesh out or complement existing datasets.

Furthermore, this won't be Professor Zlatanova’s first rodeo. She holds formal qualifications in building objectoriented databases, structuring and organisation of semantically-rich 3D data, development of new data types (such as freeform curves and surfaces), developing spatial functions, and querying and simplifying IFC models – such as integrating them into CityGML schema.

She has established training schools for 3D modelling in China, Russia, Italy, Germany, Bulgaria and Spain.

One of the centre’s proposed initial projects has already attracted a lot of attention – creating detailed 3D models of significant structures in Sydney’s CBD. Professor Zlatanova is quick to emphasise that this in itself is not ground-breaking.

But her proposed approach and intended application is, as she intends to corral existing models and datasets into an open, interoperable, standards-compliant whole.

“It's not that we’re going to create something that doesn’t exist – even Google has a 3D model of Sydney,” she said.

“The point is that we're going to see how these data are structured. We want to make sure that the data are structured in such a way that they serve many applications.”

She knows a thing or two about this, as a partner in the Open Geospatial Consortium. Her goal is to bring these existing models, along with any new data products created the centre, into line with as many international standards as possible to test the standards’ fitness for purpose. If they run into problems in transformation, she can use the data as supporting evidence for proposed amendments.

“I don't like standards, in a way. No researcher likes a standard, because standards limit their ability to look for new representations and new structures,” she said.

“But when you go to an industry application, you have to work under certain restrictions. You have to have some agreement to be able to exchange information.”

Another unique feature of the research direction that Zlatanova has planned for the centre is a unique area

OPPOSITE PAGE: A 3D raster image of Manhattan, New York, completed by Professor Zlatanova for the city’s emergency response office.

LEFT: Melbourne underground metro station in voxel representation, modelled from a 2D section drawing.

BOTTOM LEFT: Voxels – or 3D pixels – can be used to calculate shadows.

BOTTOM: Professor Sisi Zlatanova.

BELOW RIGHT: Computing net area and volume inside a commercial for taxation, using voxel-based modelling.

“Nowadays you cannot do any type of research without integrating data from different disciplines.” of interest in the Australian context – accurately modelling indoor space.

“We used to model what is concrete – the streets, the trees, the buildings. But we don't model the space in between them.

We don't model the air, we don't model the empty space inside the buildings,” she said.

“Sydney is a city that can be very hot, and people can spend a lot of time inside.

Being inside most of your time during the day imposes a lot of requirements on that environment. Is it comfortable? Is it safe? We really want to attract attention to this issue – that the interior of the building is important.”

Zlatanova’s research in recent years has featured a form of 3D modelling based on volumetric cells – voxels. She has used

this technique for a range of research applications, including representing accessibility of indoor space to different types of users, automatically calculating areas that a drone can be flown indoors, calculating net storage volume inside a warehouse for taxation purposes, and modelling a range of emergency and crisis response scenarios.

“When you're going into the third dimension, the complexity increases – this issue of how we represent the geometry is much more complex. We have the BIM representation, we have the GIS representation and I put next to these – this voxel representation,” she said.

“So for us as humans, the space is important – and to be able to model space the most appropriate way is with gridded vector representations. This kind of representations are going to be the next step to me, because voxel representation is very convenient for all kind of simulations.”

Professor Zlatanova and her research team will also be mindful of maintaining interoperability for the outputs of their work – she cites CityGML, IndoorGML, IFC standards and a range of web services as protocols that they will aim to comply with, and recognises that seamless conversions – moving towards a common data environment – is the ultimate goal.

“I think the next breakthrough that we have to make is to be able to go seamlessly from vector representations to voxel representation and vice versa.

And again – vector representations can be either for GIS or for BIM, so there we need to have seamless conversion there too,” she said.

“Nowadays you cannot do any type of research without integrating data from different disciplines.” ■ www.spatialsource.com.au 35

new products A Pléiades satellite in orbit.

Image courtesy of CNES.

SBG cuts size of inertial sensors SBG Systems say they have brought down not only the size but also the cost of their inertial sensors with the Ellipse 2 Micro Series.

Weighting in at only 10 grams, the Ellipse 2 Micro provide a 0.1° accurate attitude and connects to external GNSS for navigation, offering a high weight to performance ratio.

The company says their R&D team has been adjusting motion profiles to platforms such as UAVs, cars, and vessels, as well as in specific conditions like vibrations, high dynamics, low motion, etc, to reach the highest reliability.

The new Ellipse 2 Micro is available as an IMU for calibrated sensor data, or as an AHRS/INS delivering accurate orientation and navigation using an external GNSS receiver.

Airbus announces near real-time access to satellite data Airbus has launched near real-time satellite imagery capabilities together with its 24/7 Emergency Image Delivery Service to aid those facing emergency situations.

The company says that by leveraging the Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) polar ground station in Svalbard, Norway, Pléiades and SPOT constellation images

are now retrieved at every orbit, resulting in ultra-fast image deliveries after collection, anywhere in the world.

Boeing also says the 24/7 Service gives customers easy, immediate and roundthe-clock access to a dedicated team of satellite experts who provide timely support in case of unplanned events.

Topcon’s new GM-100 total station

Trimble releases Alloy next-gen GNSS receiver Trimble Advanced Positioning has unveiled its next generation Alloy Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) reference receiver.

Trimble says the new Alloy receiver features modernized satellite tracking and can also be used as a Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) receiver, scientific reference station, a campaign receiver for post-processing, or portable base station receiver for real-time kinematic (RTK) applications.

“Alloy provides a solution to address a variety of installation challenges faced by RTN owners and operators today,” said Mark Richter, marketing director of Trimble's Advanced Positioning Division. “The receiver can track all satellite signals at the highest possible data rate while being easy to use, access and configure.”

36 position February/March 2018

GM-100 Total Station.

Image courtesy of Topcon.

Topcon Positioning Group recently announced the GM-100, saying the new manual total station packs in both a powerful electronic distance measurement along with advanced integrated communications technology.

“It delivers the latest technological advantages in a small, sleek design,” said Ray Kerwin, director of global surveying products. “Whether operators are performing tasks such as site layout or as-built survey, the instrument delivers high-end performance with a best-in-class accuracy of up to 6000 m and 1.5 mm + 2 ppm with a prism and up to 1000 m and 2 mm + 2 ppm in reflectorless mode.”

Topcon says the GM-100 features dualaxis compensation designed to ensure stable measurements even on rough terrain by automatically correcting both horizontal and vertical angles.

The GM-100 also features integrated Bluetooth technology with no external antenna necessary for connectivity with the controller, along with 50,000 points of internal memory and up to 32GB USB storage.

PSMA releases buildings data API PSMA Australia has released an Application Programming Interface (API) that will allow access to data about any building in Australia with a roof area greater than nine square metres.

User can now use the beta version of the Buildings API for free via the PSMA Developer Portal, getting access to data on more than 8.8 million buildings, with more to come soon.

PSMA says the API enables the look up of building attributes using a single

Co

urt

esy

of

address. The attributes can include two and three dimensional building footprints, height and elevation, roof material and complexity, solar panels and adjacent swimming pools.

The company says this information could power a range of new applications like an app that tells users whether there is a pool at an address, a tool that automates quotes for roof restoration or software that helps couriers identify a building.

Trimble touts MX-9 as 'next-gen' mobile mapping system The new Trimble MX9 combines a vehicle-mounted mobile LiDAR system, multi-camera imaging and field software into a single package that the company claims combines high-quality performance, simple installation and easy operation.

The Trimble MX9 captures dense point cloud data along with 360 degree immersive georeferenced imagery using a spherical camera, GNSS/ INS technology and dual-head laser scanning sensors. The company says the system’s innovative and lightweight design facilitates easy installation and setup on a variety of vehicles.

PSM

A

Mappt Elements adds Hema integration A new partnership between MapData Services and the Takor Group, creator of the Mappt Elements iOS app, will see vastly improved coverage for rural and outback and rural areas, thanks to the integration of Hema’s rich basemap.

Mappt Elements is an offline GIS app used to create, edit, store and share

geospatial data with iPhone and iPad mobile devices, designed for users to be able to collect their own data and build layers on top of a rich set of basemaps.

Rural Australian users now stand to benefit from the partnership as Hema’s basemap becomes available to Mappt Elements users.

Position Partners inks exclusive deal to offer Tiny Surveyor Geospatial solutions provider Position Partners announced an exclusive agreement with Denmark-based TinyMobileRobots to be the exclusive distributor of the Tiny Surveyor robotic pre-marker tool throughout Australia and New Zealand.

The Tiny Surveyor is a robotic pre-marker tool its makers say saves time, increases safety and enables the user to mark out road lines automatically. The unit can interface to any GNSS as well as Topcon and Sokkia total stations for precise height measurements.

“The Tiny Surveyor is a unique piece of equipment,” said Martin Nix, Position Partners CEO. www.spatialsource.com.au 37

sssi

News and views from the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute

SSSI Board – 2017 President – Gaby van Wyk President-Elect – Zaffar Mohamed Ghouse NSW Director – Zaffar Mohamed Ghouse NT Director – Rob Sarib QLD Director – Lee Hellen SA Director – Franco Rea TAS Director – Alex Leith VIC Director – Vacant WA Director – Kerry Smyth ACT Director – Vacant Hydrography Commission Director – Richard Cullen YP representative (Observer) – Alex Pescud Company Secretary – Jonathan Saxon

38 position February/March 2018

President’s report

T

his last year – 2016/17 – was an interesting mix of positive achievements and difficult challenges for SSSI. We continue to provide quality services to our members and to the wider community. These of course include a range of webinars, regional conferences and the National event: Locate, all allowing our members to maintain a high level of growth in their professional development.

I realise that it is customary to thank all volunteers for the enormous effort provided, but this year, SSSI’s activities have increased substantially, much of it driven by men and women willing to give time and effort – so again a very special thanks to everyone who have contributed.

Without volunteers there would be no SSSI. As we all know, this year we implemented the new structures embedded in the new constitution. We have installed a new Board, with broader responsibility and representation.

Although some of the regions started slowly, we now have fully functioning Commission and Regional Management Committees. On top of these, during the SSSI National Taskforce Review process, many standing advisory committees were proposed, and have now been implemented, to improve services to members and the professions.

Overall, these changes have proven to be successful, because it focuses attention on specific matters of importance to the Institute. Herewith a brief comment on some of these:

Permanent Advisory Committees These Committees exists to provide the Board with focused, specialised advice.

• With the disbanding of the Consultative Council some of their responsibilities were handed over to the Commission Chairs committee. This is now well established and manages all commission matters at a national level. Their narrow focus allows them to concentrate on issues central to all professions and commissions within SSSI. This committee is currently chaired by Richard Cullen.

• The Board no longer has a single individual tasked with the responsibility of the treasurer. This responsibility now rests with the Finance, Risk and Audit Permanent Committee, and this shift has proven very successful. Since the

Gaby van Wyk

establishment of this committee the Board has received good financial advice from a group of members with many years’ experience in financial matters. This committee is currently chaired by Alex Leigh.

• Our Ethical Standards forms a pillar of this Institute. We have established the Professional Standards committee, who is now tasked with managing all ethical issues as well as the complaints procedure.

The committee has reworked the procedures and documentation relevant to ethical standards and can handle any issues delegated to them. The committee is also connected to the ethical committees of international partners such as FIG and URISA as well as Professions Australia. There is no permanent Complaints Committee, however, the Professional Standards Committee has established the procedure to establish such a committee when required.

For that reason, membership of the Professional Standards Committee requires a more rigorous vetting process. This committee is currently chaired by me.

• SSSI has always had a Membership committee, but its formation in the past was structured around review of applications only. In line with the recommendations received from our membership, this committee now has the status of a Permanent Advisory Committee status and they are tasked with broader responsibilities in terms of Membership management. This committee has done some excellent work in the past that was often not as

SSSI sustaining partners

visible as it should have been – these changes should remedy this issue.

This committee is currently chaired by John Minehan.

Standing Committees These committees are more operational and exist to further the vision mission and purpose of SSSI. • For the first time we now have a functioning national committee tasked with Education and Leadership Development. It took a while for the Education committee to get fully established, but now that it is, they have made good progress at a national level. National vs Regional activities are not fully coordinated yet, but a broad discussion was initiated, and we see positive signs in this space.

This is an important matter and many members have been involved in a broad range of educational outreach activities. This committee understands the value and contribution made by many – also by other bodies. They are discussing, negotiating and generally engaging roll players across Australia.

We don’t know what the future will look like, but we are currently engaged with roll players and programs such as “Survey: A Life without Limits” and “Destination Spatial”. This committee is currently chaired by Greg Ledwidge.

• Unfortunately, the proposed Career Development committee has not been fully established yet. A start was made but the person who took on this job had to withdraw due to extreme worklife issues. In the new year we will turn our attention to this committee again.

• The Fellows and Honorary Fellows committee has always been active and although we have had a change in the role of chair – this committee continues as previously. This committee is currently chaired by Peter Swan.

• The Future Directions proposal suggested the establishment Membership Services Standing committee, different from the Member Advisory Committee, with emphasis on the ‘Services’. This committee is highly dependent on the SSSI Website, and therefore have not had the opportunity to deliver much. This has now all changed, and we will see more from them in future. This committee is currently chaired by Kerry Smyth.

• The Board initially tried to create another committee to manage the Journal of Spatial Sciences. After some discussion with the Board of the Journal of Spatial Sciences, it was decided to establish a closer relationship

with the board who are already doing a great job. We are currently in discussions to determine how this will work, as we must remember that this is a joint venture with MSIA. • The Board has also started with the formation of a group to help with the management of SSSI content for Position magazine. Unfortunately, progress has not been as quick as we wanted, so more work needs to be done before we will see the advantages of having this group.

Collaborations As Peak National Body for Survey and Spatial professions, SSSI takes its relationships with other players in this industry quite seriously. The fractious relationships in the industry are harmful to everyone. We have decided that it would be more prudent for us to focus on our role in the industry; do what we do, to the best of our ability and to engage in discussion with others as much as we can.

It is important to note again that the 2026 Agenda document was released during Locate 2017. This document outlines many activities within the spatial industry that will foster growth in the industry. SSSI believes that not all the activities are relevant to us an Institute.

However, the document is a valuable resource and as far as Professional Practice and Development is concerned, it aligns with our own strategy and as such it is a worthwhile cause to support. As far as this agenda is concerned, we intend to provide leadership in terms of Education, the Bodies of Knowledge, Professional Practice and Professional Development while we continue to collaborate on other strategies in the agenda. Burt as stated in previous communication, we do not consider any mergers with bodies such as SIBA. These are some of our activities in support of collaboration: • Although the Future Directions proposal suggested that a separate Locate Conference Planning standing committee be established

by SSSI, the board has decided to work with SIBA in this regard. Locate Conference Planning is now managed by a joint SIBA / SSSI committee who reports to the Locate Board.

SSSI provides three members of the six-member management group. Dr. Zaffar Mohamed-Ghouse currently heads this team.

• Another suggestion from the Future Directions proposal was for SSSI to establish an Awards & Recognition Standing Committee. On this front, and because of the many overlaps,

Commission Chairs Engineering & Mining Surveying 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 Remote Sensing & Photogrammetry Commission Chair Vacant chair.rspc@sssi.org.au Spatial Information & Cartography Commission Chair Hanno Klahn chair.sicc@sssi.org.au Regional Committee Chairs ACT Regional Chair – Greg Ledwidge chair.act@sssi.org.au NSW Regional Chair – Zaffar Mohamed Ghouse chair.nsw@sssi.org.au NT Regional Chair – Rob Sarib chair.nt@sssi.org.au QLD Regional Chair – Roy Somerville chair.qld@sssi.org.au SA Regional Chair – Franco Rea chair.sa@sssi.org.au TAS Regional Chair – Alex Leith chair.tas@sssi.org.au VIC Regional Chair – Thierry Demathieu 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 SSSI proposed to SIBA that instead of a stand-alone committee, we collaborate to form a joint front. This was met with their approval, and we are working towards this goal.

• While we do recognise SIBA as a partner, we also recognise that this partnership will not be helpful in all jurisdictions. We have started, quite some time ago, with an endeavour to establish a good relationship with the EISSI franchise owners, ACS and ISNSW. We have made some good progress, but for this past year were again knocked back, resulting in the undesirable situation that two sets of industry awards were conducted for NSW. This is not a healthy situation and SSSI continues to discuss the issue. We understand that the other parties are also prepared to continue this discussion.

• SSSI is proud of its heritage and especially proud of its ISA lineage.

But after the failure to bring all the players together under SSSI, the conversations around survey issues of national concern also stopped. This year we decided to change that. We have established a National Survey Discussion Forum. Currently this is an agreement to engage in discussion relevant to the survey profession and currently involves members from SSSI, ISNSW and ISVIC. There is no formal MOU or like agreement – just an agreement to talk. We are committed to continue along this path.

• We all know that SSSI is the National representative for the Survey and Spatial Industries at an international level. Apart from these large international relationships, many smaller groups have asked for liaison at some level as well. Unfortunately, a number of these agreements ended up slipping, and this caused some embarrassment for the institute. We have rectified the issue by establishing an International Liaison group to keep an eye on international relationships. This committee is currently chaired by Rob Sarib.

In reading this, you are probably wondering about the number of committees and groups. It is not an easy task, but remember we are here for the members, and we are also volunteers.

There is room for many more people to assist. Yes – we need you!

WEBSITE At the beginning of this year the Board decided to load membership fees with a small amount to redevelop our website.

40 position February/March 2018

Our management team were informed that the website was vulnerable, and that speedy action was required. However, after the website was compromised twice in one month, a Quick-Fix was applied, but this simply resulted in extra costs with no real solution. When the site was compromised again, with Quick-Fix in place, the Board reviewed all the issues at stake and decided to take the site down all together. This hampered our ability to provide the service our members expect, but thanks to extra effort by staff, the service levels remained high. Communication though was difficult and at times had a negative impact on the service provided to our members.

After our General Manager departed, one of our Board members, Alex Leith took over the role of project manager on the website and thanks largely to Alex and the staff, we have a new website today.

The Board truly appreciates the time and effort he put it.

This year’s conferences were especially noteworthy. Many reported that Locate 17 was one of the best.

HIGHLIGHTS • This year’s conferences were especially noteworthy. Many reported that Locate 17 was one of the best. Participants commented on the high quality of the program and divers yet comprehensive range of topics. The organising team also made a special effort to be more inclusive of the survey disciplines, and although admittedly there is a lot more room for improvement, the general feeling was that it is on the right track forward. Vendors likewise provided positive feedback, some even booking their spots for the next one. I will leave the regional reports to the respective chairs, but want to note that at regional level there was again some very positive messages around the events.

• Going into this year the board approved a budget with a small loss.

I am however glad to report that we ended up with a small profit of $$$$, thanks largely to Locate 2017.

MEMBERSHIP It frustrates me to report that the SSSI membership numbers are still down

despite our recent governance reform.

The Board has had an in-depth look at the reasons for this and cannot pinpoint any single cause, but has identified a number of contributing factors. I feel that it is my responsibility to discuss these factors in a bit more detail: • SSSI Website Attacked –This caused the old website to be de-commissioned prematurely, an interim stop gap page, and an acceleration of the planned redeveloped project. The unavailability of the Website as our primary mode of communication, was frustrating for staff and members alike. Essentially, the situation deterred existing members from renewing and potential members from joining. We believe this was a major problem this year. Having it back up is great, but the process took way too long.

• Rising Competition – due to fracturing in the industry whereby previously marginalised or dormant groups are re-generating and offering attractive membership rates. Fracturing is not good for our institute, nor is it great for the industry. We believe in regular open dialogues and continue to invite conversations. We will also continue to strive towards excellence in member services.

• Lack of Diversity – including age, gender and cultural diversity.

• Generational issues. The age profile of SSSI membership does not reflect the age profile of the wider industry.

SSSI projects an image of a traditional professional body that is in decline.

We are still an aging industry and there are many members of retiring age. There is however, a fixation with age rather than promoting the value of intergenerational skills and knowledge transfer. I am grateful for some real leadership shown by the YP committee who have done an in-depth survey and come up with valuable recommendations. Implementing these will help us to focus on getting younger generations engaged while we still serve the wider community.

• Gender Issues. There is still a hidden bias towards women in our industry.

There is still a large remuneration gap, and consequently, women seem to be less engaged in professional matters. Our Women in Spatial group are currently collaborating with FIG to produce a Commission 1 Paper on this issue – and they need help. But it is not enough to contribute towards the International conversation only. We need to do something about this locally too. So, what will we do?

SSSI sustaining partners

• P rovide continued support for WIS group in SSSI – I have invited the chair of women in spatial to have an observer status on the Board and I encourage more people – men and women, to join this special interest group • Work towards equal numbers of women on committees and boards • Get equal numbers of women on keynote panels during conferences and seminars.

• We have also introduced a new

award recognising woman in the industry.

• Pace of Change - In 2015 our membership requested a review of internal issues. This resulted in the new constitution, but I realise that it will take time to turn everyone around. These changes are only now starting to show positive returns.

• Marketing & Communication Channels – We recognise that SSSI has not been proactive in adapting to a range of media options that are

popular for different demographics and market sectors. These options are resource hungry and don’t reflect the skills base of our volunteers. An increased membership base would potentially draw in these skills.

I remain optimistic as we have already seen positive signs. However – we realise that there is no room for complacency and are committed to do our best.

Gabriel Van Wyk President

Surveyors successfully challenge trademark application

A

ustralia's licensed and registered surveyors have scored an important win that will help protect the integrity of the profession.

IP Australia has rejected an application to register the term 'chartered surveyor', thus removing the risk of introducing a new and confusing term into the industry.

The Council of Reciprocating Surveyors Boards of Australia and New Zealand (CRSBANZ ) successfully argued that such a trademark may have been in conflict with Australian surveying legislation.

The application was made by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), which has a membership category for chartered surveyors.

However, CRSBANZ argued successfully that the term had no value or relevance in Australia.

"In this country, a surveyor must be registered with a state board as a registered or licensed cadastral surveyor to perform boundary surveys and to retain that registration must maintain a competency and knowledge of cadastral law and its application," said CRSBANZ Secretary, Murray Fox. "Membership of RICS does not infer or represent meeting the standards for registration in Australia as a cadastral surveyor and it was important for us to challenge the application and protect the public in compliance with Australian legislation."

CRSBANZ was supported in its action by the Surveyors' Boards of Australia and New Zealand, the Spatial Industry Business Association (SIBA), and the Australian Institute of Mining Surveyors (AIMS).

CRSBANZ Secretary Murray Fox said it was significant that the hearing officer, in his finding, had noted that the term chartered surveyor" contains little or no inherent adaptation to distinguish the designated services".

The resulting decision should give Australians a sense of certainty when engaging licensed or registered surveyors, because they will know that registration ensures a professional surveyor who has suitably demonstrated his or her competency.

CRSBANZ brings together the licensing boards in all eight Australian state and territories plus New Zealand. The council encourages and supports all jurisdictions to adopt standards for best practice in surveying and provide mutual recognition of qualifications.

www.spatialsource.com.au 41

sssi New Hydrographer of Australia As of the 15th of December 2017 Commodore Brett Brace, RAN retired as the Hydrographer of Australia and was replaced by Commodore Fiona Freeman, RAN. Commodore Fiona Freeman was commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy in February 1988. During her 30 year career, she has specialised as a Hydrographic Surveyor and gained experience at sea and ashore in the areas of command, operations, training and human resource management.

As a Junior Officer, Fiona spent time at sea in HMA Ships Stalwart, Flinders, Moresby and Paluma and HMNZS Monowai. In 1992 she participated in Sail Training Ship Young Endeavour’s circumnavigation of the globe as part of the international commemoration of Christopher Columbus’ journey 500 years earlier. Fiona was aboard HMAS Jervis Bay when it deployed to Somalia in 1993 in support of Operation Solace.

Fiona has commanded at the operational level at sea as Commanding Officer HMAS Benalla (2002-3) and HS Red (2006-09). She has seen operational service under the United Nations mandate in East Timor (XO HMAS Labuan 2000) and participated in Australian Government Border Protection operations at sea (CO HS Red 2008). Fiona has also held a number of headquarter-level positions both in

Commodore Fiona Freeman, RAN]

Commodore Fiona Freeman was commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy in February 1988. During her 30 year career, she has specialised as a Hydrographic Surveyor and gained experience at sea and ashore...

the Single Service (Navy) and the Joint environment in the areas of training, operational planning and human resources. In the training area she has been in charge of Navy Hydrographic specialist training. In the area of human resources she has been the lead career advisor for all Navy Junior Officers and subsequently, on promotion to Captain in 2011, the Director of Navy’s Career Management Agency. Since then Fiona has been Director Military Options (J55) in the planning branch at Joint Operations Command and has also served as the Chief-of-Staff to the Vice Chief of the Defence Force and the Deputy Chief-of-Staff within Headquarters Navy Strategic Command.

She assumed the role of Hydrographer of Australia on promotion to Commodore in December 2017.

Fiona is a graduate of both the United Kingdom’s Higher Command and Staff Course and Australia’s Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies. She holds Master Degrees in Management (Defence Studies), Arts (Strategic Studies) and Hydrographic Surveying.

International Land Measurement Standards Coalition (ILMS) launches discussion paper

During 2016 number of professional bodies gathered to develop voluntary guidelines for the responsible governance of land tenure. Inaugural meetings were held at the FIG Working Week in Christchurch in May 2016 and at the Headquarters of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in July 2016.

There are currently around twenty five ILMS Coalition members including SSSI, NZIS, FIG, RICS as well as peak national surveying bodies from USA, South Africa, Europe and Russia.

42 position February/March 2018

Since that time the ILMS Coalition has been meeting at FIG and World Bank Events and an ILMS Standards Setting Committee (SSC) was formed to develop a standard with strong international principles based on a'Minimum requirement to secure legal rights and enable efficient/secure transfer and transaction of land and property rights'.

Land is being seen in a holistic and interconnected manner from mapping to security of tenure, to taxation and acquisition etc. Geospatial technologies if used appropriately can provide solutions to these problems. Surveyors are the profession on the ground that enable and make land markets work.

The ILMS is now ready to launch the ILMS consultation platform and

ask for the views of the global land profession. The ILMS Standards Setting Committee has produced a robust but flexible ILMS standard.

Global, open and transparent consultation is seen as an important part of the standards process and not only helps us get the message out to the global land community but also to help bring in additional commentary and knowledge. The consultation document is available at the following URL https://consultations.intstandards.org/ consult.ti/ilms/consultationHome The consultation is open until the end of Feb 2018 and can be answered in a variety of ways.

The discussion paper has been included in the programmes for World Bank 2018 and FIG Istanbul 2018.

The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

February/March 2018 – No. 93

The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

POLE POSITION Outpacing the field with reality capture

Official publication of

inside Throwing down UNSW invests in spatial's future

What’s in an address?

Cutting-edge solutions to an ancient problem

Position Feb-Mar 2018.indd 1

subscribe YES! I wish to receive Position magazine WITHIN AUSTRALIA*

$76.00 – 1 YEAR, 6 ISSUES $121.60 – 2 YEARS, 12 ISSUES – SAVE 20% $159.60 – 3 YEARS, 18 ISSUES – SAVE 30% * Prices quoted include GST. All payments must be made payable in Australian Dollars.

INTERPOINT EVENTS ABN 98 105 512 469 PHONE: 1800 651 422 RETURN YOUR SUBSCRIPTION FORM VIA FAX: 02 8580 6312 MAIL: P.O. BOX 55 Glebe NSW 2037 EMAIL: subscriptions@intermedia.com.au WEB: www.intermedia.com.au

Art of the cadastre The crucial discipline of cadastral surveying

Position magazine is the only ANZ-wide independent publication for the Spatial Industries.

Position covers the acquisition, manipulation, application and presentation of geo-data in a wide range of industries including agriculture, disaster management, environmental management, local government, utilities, and land-use planning.

It covers the increasing use of geospatial technologies and analysis in decision-making for businesses and government.

Technologies addressed include satellite and aerial remote sensing, land and hydrographic surveying, satellite positioning systems, photogrammetry, mobile mapping and GIS. Position contains news, views and applications stories, as well as coverage of the latest technologies that interest professionals working with spatial information.

It is the official magazine of the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute.

13/02/2018 12:43 PM

PLEASE FIND ENCLOSED MY CHEQUE/MONEY ORDER FOR $ _______________ PAYABLE TO INTERPOINT EVENTS OR PLEASE CHARGE MY: MASTERCARD

VISA

AMEX

CARDHOLDER NAME: _________________________________________________ EXPIRY DATE: _____/_____ SIGNATURE: ________________________________ NAME: _______________________________________________________________ JOB TITLE: ____________________________________________________________ COMPANY: ___________________________________________________________ ADDRESS: ____________________________________________________________ SUBURB/TOWN: ____________________________ POSTCODE: _____________ PH: _______________________________ FAX: _____________________________ EMAIL: _______________________________________________________________

The Intersection of Infrastructure and Technology

Growing infrastructure demands around the world are creating tremendous challenges and opportunities.

Topcon works to stay a step ahead, by creating solutions that incorporate technology advancements into the way you work today and tomorrow, transforming the way infrastructure is built.

Our integration of high-accuracy positioning, high-speed imaging, cloud-based information management and down-to-earth simplicity creates higher productivity, enhanced quality and improved sustainability.

With Topcon, you can stay ahead of your competition and meet the challenges of Infrastructure growth.

Watch Topcon Positoning Systems President and CEO Ray O’Connor’s Bloomberg “NEXT INFRASTRUCTURE” interview: www.topconpositioning.com/Infrastructure.

Let’s discuss your next project: 1300 867 266 | www.positionpartners.com.au