A surveyor by profession, Mr Nairn wants to introduce a spatially enabled government and, after launching the Government's e-government strategy earlier this month, has charged the Australian Government Information Management Office with investigating the concept.
State and local governments often held the spatial information that would be required, he said.
And Mr Nairn is familiar with mapping and location technology and the power he believes comes from analysing data and statistics against spatial information.
"One area I'm particularly interested in AGIMO pursuing ... is the research and facilitation of a spatially enabled government or, in other words, using place or location to manage and integrate government services and enhance business opportunities," he said.
The process involved linking business transactions to places - known as georeferencing - and using the georeferenced places to facilitate the evaluation, analysis and comparison of relationships among people, places, transactions and governments.
"Imagine combining technologies such as Google Earth with other data on the natural environment and with the built, human-developed or constructed environment - and being able to view, analyse and make decisions based on seeing where health, education, business, or environmental issues are occurring by combining spatial ... information with non-spatial information such as facts and figures."
Mr Nairn has spoken on the subject in a number of speeches to industry and government since becoming minister, including the Government Technology World Australia conference and at the launch of the e-government strategy.
"There are great opportunities for government in getting the place and location of information joined with the huge amounts of data that government have in various departments," he said.
"So you're able to link business transactions to a place in using those few reference places to facilitate the evaluation, analysis and comparison of relationships between people, places, transactions and governments.
"You get much better government decisions if you can do your analysis in a more strategic way, which you can do if you have that spatial content to your data."
Mr Nairn said it would take "some time" to envisage, research and implement the technology -- particularly as it demanded the involvement of the various levels of government.
"It is other levels of government that, in fact, hold most of the data-sets in this respect," he said, adding that it would require an "ambitious" level of co-operation.
"One of the big challenges is between our various departments at a federal level, but then (we have) to take it that step further between different levels of government. Often, it's local government out on the ground that delivers many of these services."
Autor: Selina Mitchell
Quelle: Australian IT, 18.04.2006
