Enhancing Australian Foundation Spatial Data Framework to support
Australia's future
Abstract
The Foundation Spatial Data Framework (FSDF) is a framework of ten
national authoritative geographic data themes that supports
evidence-based social-economic decision making across multiple levels of
Australian and New Zealand government agencies, industry, research and
the community. The AAA data management principles (Authoritative,
Accurate and Accessible), articulated for FSDF, are easily translatable
to the FAIR Principles and applied to ensure: • Ability to Find data
through rich and consistently implemented metadata; • Access to metadata
and data by humans and machines while practicing federated data
management within trusted data repositories; • Interoperability of
metadata and data through adoption of common standards and application
of best practices; and • Reusability of data by capturing licencing
constraints and information about its quality and provenance. The
Location Information Knowledge Platform (LINK) was developed in 2016 as
a digital catalogue of FSDF content. This governed, online, dynamic,
analysis and discovery tool was designed to enhance the discovery of
FSDF datasets, support work planning and indicate the legal frameworks,
agency priorities and use case associated with FSDF data. More than 73
Australian government agencies and commercial organisations use this
Platform. Current work includes: • Building common high-level and
individual lower-level information models (ontologies) for the FSDF and
each dataset; • Development of a new architecture for persistent
identifiers and identifier incorporation in the datasets; • The ISO
19115-1-based Australian and New Zealand Metadata profile and best
practices user guides; and • Testing new workflows for metadata and data
governance and integration utilising a set of common cloud-based
infrastructure. On realisation, the FSDF will become a necessary
component of spatial socio-economic decision making across Australian
and New Zealand government agencies and the private sector. FSDF will
encourage cross-sector partnerships and enable seamless access to
authoritative spatial data across organisational and jurisdictional
boundaries, thus contributing to economic growth, improved public
safety, meeting legal and policy obligations and sustaining business
needs.