Granular detail combined with broad coverage and distributed, multiple stakeholders put digital city models beyond the scope of one single custodian or professional domain. Data linking and sharing, accessibility and discoverable content are paramount factors for the long-term usefulness of city models.

The UrbanIT project is researching geospatial technologies surrounding Sydney's Green Square urban renewal precinct. This research focuses on the capacity of semantically linked datasets to support urban planning and analysis across the triple-bottom line, weaving together social, environmental and economic information. The research examines the potential for improved interoperability by harnessing existing and emerging web technologies and developing a set of Ontologies to formalise what the components of the built environment are, how they interact and where their associated data streams are found. The Ontologies have detailed the Cadastre, Local Environment Plans, State Environmental Protection Policies and mapped these to the open schemas of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), CityGML and Google Earth's KML.

The complex human nature of the city combined with its vivid spatial dynamics makes it an intricate test bed for both technical and quantitative techniques, however with greater access to data and information communication, important qualitative issues of privacy and publicity emerge: what information should be publicised and freely available, and what should remain private and highly secure?

The UrbanIT project is being conducted at the City Futures Research Centre, University of New South Wales and is funded by the Australian Research Council. Our partner organisations are City of Sydney, NSW Department of Planning and Landcom.