Geospatial editing over a federated cloud geodatabase for the state of NSW

Abstract

Geospatial information changes continually, and geospatial datasets become outdated and unsuitable for decision support due to inadequate data quality. They are also costly to maintain. There is a growing demand for accurate and consistent geospatial information in critical sectors such as emergency response. Within the land fabric geospatial vector data context, the ownership of data is distributed vertically among many government agencies by thematic types and horizontally by different administrative domains. A geospatial transaction, that updates changes, say for example, the release of a portion of forest-land for residential development, could inherently span across multiple agencies, infringing the jurisdictional responsibilities of individual agencies who own the participating data layers. Unauthorized editing and even publishing of updated data takes place in different organizations, unaware of editing taking place in other agencies. While updating of geospatial datasets for improved accuracy and distribution takes place, the legal aspects are generally ignored. In the context of current jurisdictional structure, to avoid duplicate geospatial editing as well as to support legally binding transaction, a geodatabase must transcend organizational boundaries and become truly federated. In addition, it needs to support a mechanism for versioned geospatial editing and more importantly support commits that could span many days. In this paper, we present a versioned editing model for a geospatial cloud database environment. The paper also discusses a new data workflow paradigm that utilizes the salient features of cloud for updating geospatial data addressing the issues highlighted. This is followed by a succinct discussion of the controlled investigation of the paradigm for the case of Australia's NSW state.