It has been generally accepted that, if the Northern Territory (NT) is to reap the benefits of its investment in its spatial data infrastructure, then land information must be readily accessible by decision makers and the community. This approach is consistent with NT Government's commitment to ensuring that the NT captures the benefits of the spatial information technology and its vision of establishing the NT as a leading edge user of on-line technology.
Data is as important as functionality. The data held in the NT Government's enterprise applications and transactional databases collectively form a major business asset that can provide the foundation for fact based decision making when a spatial/temporal context is added.
The NT Government has purchased and implemented the Google Earth Enterprise (GEE) software suite allowing it to serve NT Government spatial data to government users using an intuitive 3D interface to provide this spatial/temporal context. This customised service/application is called NT Visualiser.
This presentation outlines the strategies adopted in the Northern Territory to get its own corporate spatial data into order so that NT Visualiser could become integral to the NT Government's automated mapping processes that "fuse" database information from various types of spatial environments.
Having a single source of truth for geospatial data has eliminated duplication of data, facilitated information sharing among agencies, and reduced confusion, so much so that the GEE Client has become part of the standard operating environment for all NT Government employees.
Standards based geospatial data repositories (which includes the GEE globes) generated by NT Government agencies have become the central point of truth for custodians and publishers of web mapping solutions throughout the Northern Territory.
The techniques employed in the NTG to integrate the diverse range of data required to support and visualise the land development and management processes and emergency management responses into the NT's spatial data infrastructure in a sustainable and transparent fashion are described. Issues of audience-specific content, data access, maintenance, redundancy, presentation and licensing are also discussed. The challenge of
implementing these services utilising the GEE framework to be compatible with other third party and legacy business applications and GIS software packages has been a natural progression towards "spatially organising data" that should be of interest to all spatial data infrastructure providers.