Architectural Review of the NSW Government Spatial Portals and Spatial Digital Twin
The Challenge
Spatial Services NSW has established a collaborative web portal for the sharing of spatial data and services across government, industry and individuals. The portal aims to be an online access point and exchange for spatial data and spatial data services. Although the current platforms, the Spatial Collaboration Portal (SCP), the Spatial Hosting Portal (SHP) and the Spatial Digital Twin (SDT) provide valuable resources to end users there are opportunities to improve usability, performance and operational efficiency of these as well as to develop an overall architecture that can adapt to meet the rapidly developing needs of the spatial data user community as a whole. In particular, there is a need to broaden the scope of spatial data and its use, extending this to include the concepts of ‘spatial digital twins’ and data provided by proliferating numbers of ‘Internet of things’ devices and extending use into new industries and applications.
This project undertook a review of the capabilities of the current platforms and provided roadmaps for development over short-, medium- and long-terms to meet these ongoing and changing needs.
Partners
The project partners are the NSW Department of Customer Service, Spatial Services Division , Business Aspect and Queensland University of Technology.
The Solution
The objectives of this work were to:
- Review the strategic aims and develop high-level requirements;
- Review the existing platforms in the context of these requirements and identified focus areas;
- Establish key architectural principals as the basis for ongoing design and development;
- Consider and recommend solution adaptations and developments to meet current and identified developing requirements;
- Provide roadmaps for short, medium and long-terms that will provide improvements in usability, performance and operational efficiency.
Impact
This project facilitated an effective and efficient design process of platforms to support the delivery of products and services by Spatial Services NSW to their customers associated data consumers. Additionally, it allowed the need for other spatial data producers and custodians and other stakeholders and users to distribute their spatial data via Spatial Services’ platforms to be met and to grow with the industry.
Reducing the complexity of the system to end users and making it more intuitive improves alignment with user expectations and help to grow the user base. Improvement to a number of key non-functional areas also better supported business and user needs, including the management of identity and access, performance and load handling, support for system interoperability and more efficient administration and operation.
Addressing these issues prior to significant growth is vital to the success of the spatial data platforms and digital twin initiative. The review also reviewed how the current platform can best be configured and deployed, altered or extended where appropriate, to meet the overall prioritisation of needs and to provide a roadmap for its development in this context.
Contact
To learn more, contact FrontierSI at contact@frontiersi.com.au or Project Manager, Dan Woodrow, at dwoodrow@frontiersi.com.au.