The development of a frameworkand associated tools for the integration ofmulti-sourced spatial datasets

The world of today heavily relies on spatial data to manage the natural and built environments.Monitoring and controlling the impact of human activities on environment and the impact of naturalenvironment changes (including natural hazards) on built environment is a major policy driver formany jurisdictions. The mitigation of natural hazards including tsunami, earthquake and landslide andsecuring citizens against them has become another priority of nations , especially after Indonesia’stsunami. September 11 was also a remarkable point in history which attracts attentions towardsproviding more efficient counter-terrorism initiatives to secure citizens.In many countries meeting sustainable development objectives including social cohesion andenvironment protection together with economical growth is the most overwhelming policy driver. Inthese countries most of legislations and decisions are made, if they meet sustainable developmentobjectives.All above mentioned activities try to control the natural and built environments and monitor theimpacts of one environment on the other one. To control and monitor built and natural environments,the components of these environments need to be integrated to provide the factual model of realworld. Effective access and use of spatial data has been addressed by developing SDIs (Spatial DataInfrastructures) which one of its objectives is to address and provide requirements for effective dataintegration.The effective integration of built and natural environmental datasets is an ultimate goal of manyspatial decision making systems which has not been fully achieved, however technical integration andinteroperability of multi-sourced spatial data have received much attention. The integration of multisourcedspatial data due to the diversity of data providers needs more than technical tools andconsiderations. Institutional, social, legal and policy requirements must also be taken intoconsideration in order to achieve effective integration.This paper aims to highlight and address technical issues together with legal, social, institutional andpolicy issues associated with the technical integration of datasets. This paper also will address thefindings and observations of some case studies which have been conducted in order to investigate theproblems of effective data integration.Case study investigation has been done on two regions datasets from two Australia’s states (Victoriaand New South Wales) and also same regions’ data from Australia’s national mapping agency(Geoscience Australia). Datasets from these jurisdictions have been investigated against each otherand problems and findings have been highlighted in this paper. These jurisdictions’ mapping agencieshave been visited and together with findings of six other international countries within Asia-Pacificregion will incorporate in designing technical tools for proper integration including a framework, anintegration data model and a web-service. In designing these tools, marginal non-technical issues willalso be taken into consideration and non-technical issues will also be discussed. However the mainfocus of the paper is on technical issues.