[Aust-NZ] Spatial@Gov [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Bruce Bannerman]

Ben,

Congratulations on another excellent conference!

Spatial at Gov is now clearly one of Australia's major spatial conferences and
in the same league as WALIS and the former SSI biennial conferences.

The stand out items for me were:

- the widespread recognition across many presentations and sessions that we
all need to be working with Open Spatial Standards as a priority;

- two good strategic moves in:

  + the formation of an OSDM team dedicated to fostering the use of Open
    Spatial Standards within Australia (including Chris Body and John
    Hockaday); and

  + an MOU announced between OSDM and OGC.

- The large number of presentations where presenters mentioned that they
were using Open Source Spatial products;

- The widespread interest in the Government 2.0 initiative; and (of course)

- the launch of the Bureau's GeoFabric datasets, complete with a
topologically correct model of Australia's drainage network (@ 250K).

Bruce