Spatially enabling Australia - the next decade.

A strategy for the development of the Australian spatial information industry called 'Spatially Enabling Australia' has recently been developed by the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information. It comprises three fundamental research programs and an integrated applications program. Research Program 1, 'Positioning,' underpins a full framework of continuous operating reference stations to ultimately enable all of continental Australia to be capable of real-time precise positioning services based on global navigation satellite systems. Research Program 2, 'Automated Spatial Information Generation,' addresses complex processing of multiple remote sensing sources. Research Program 3, 'Spatial Infrastructures,' helps form the foundation for development of an Australian Spatial Marketplace that will make accessible vast amounts of government held data under a new licensing and access regime which supports combination with user-generated content from the mass market. The three core programs are integrated with Program 4, 'Applications,' to support users from the Health, Defense and Security, Energy and Utilities, Urban Development, and Agriculture-Natural Resources-Climate Change sectors. Program 4 drives outputs from the three core research programs in sector-specific deployments for high impact. This will see a rapid acceleration of the use and value adding of information products and services that utilize spatial information. There are considerable research and development challenges that must be met in order to achieve the strategic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]