Position issue 100 April-May 2019 by The Intermedia Group

April/May 2019 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; No. 100

The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

100th EDITION SPECIAL

NEXT GEN

GIS

From web to the Cloud to UX

Official publication of

inside Virtual Reef Diver Informed intervention via spatial modelling

Absolute precision Cutting edge GNSS for road autonomy

Centennial reflection Looking back at an industry in flux

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contents

April/May 2019 No.100

features 14 Q&A with Erin Peterson

44 Filling in the gaps

We speak with Erin Peterson, lead of the Virtual Reef Diver project, which maps coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef with unprecedented spatial cover and temporal accuracy.

18 Fit for purpose

Mapping Australia’s marine estate with the formidable hydrographic surveying capability of the Marine National Facility’s deep water research vessels.

48 Locate19 program

Volker Janssen of NSW Spatial Services takes us under the bonnet of the GDA94-GDA2020 transformation grids.

24 State of play Jon Fairall on some of the new technologies and models that may redefine geospatial business models in 2019 and beyond.

30 Looking back on a century In celebration of the 100th issue of Position, we reflect on significant industry developments.

38 Q&A with Rod Bryant

What’s on and when at the biggest event on the geospatial calendar for 2019.

regulars 4 7 8 50 52

Upfront, calendar Editorial News New products SSSI

A look at the bleeding edge of absolute positioning for autonomous road vehicles with Rod Bryant of u-blox. www.spatialsource.com.au 3

upfront

Upcoming Events 8-10 April: Locate Conference 2019, Melbourne, Victoria www.locateconference.com 8-10 April: Commercial UAV Expo Europe, Amsterdam, Netherlands www.expouav.com/europe 25-26 April: EnerGis conference, New York, USA https://energis.us 8 May: FME World Tour 2019, Sydney, NSW https://1spatial.com/au/event/fmeworld-tour-2019-sydney

Mistaken identity

ew Australian mammals have bamboozled scientists, conservations and politicians alike as much as the dingo. Confounded by limited descriptions penned by arriving Europeans in 1788 and subsequent interbreeding with introduced domestic dogs, the debate over whether to treat dingoes as native animals within the scientific community had been a vexed one – until now. A group of 20 leading researchers has found, unequivocally, that the dingo is a native Australian species, wholly distinct from all other canids. The finding has significant implications. Scientific indecision has contributed to inconsistent, typically harsh policy that affords none of the protections afforded to other native animals. Dingoes are currently classified as vertebrate pest animals, nonnative wild dogs in NSW, Victoria Western Australia and Queensland, where there is a bounty on dingo scalps. Victoria’s bounty was overturned by the Daniels government in 2018. The classification of dingoes as a pest animal – explicitly grouped with feral and wild dogs, cats and foxes – incentivises killing dingoes by shooting, trapping or the recommended control measure: consignment to a slow, hideous death by way of 1080 poison. Lead author of the paper recently published in Zootaxa, Dr. Bradley Smith from Central Queensland University, said that his team has presented scientifically valid arguments to support the ongoing recognition of the dingo as a distinct species, Canis dingo, as was originally proposed by German naturalist Friederich Meyer in 1793. “The dingo has been geographically isolated from all other canids, and genetic mixing driven mainly by human interventions has only been occurring recently,” Dr. Smith said.

4 position April/May 2019

9 May: FME World Tour 2019, Brisbane, Qld https://1spatial.com/au/ event/fme-world-tour-2019-brisbane

Dr. Smith said that there is no historical evidence of domestication once the dingo arrived in Australia, and that the degree of domestication prior to arrival is uncertain and likely to be low, certainly compared to modern domestic dogs. “We show that dingoes have survived in Australia for thousands of years, subject to the rigours of natural selection, thriving in all terrestrial habitats, and largely in the absence of human intervention or aid,” he said. Late last year, the West Australian government amended its Biodiversity Conservation Act with an exemption to not only continue the dingo’s legal classification as a wild dog, but further strip it of its categorisation as a native animal, allowing weapons such as crossbows and explosives to be used to kill dingoes – actions that carry a$50,000 fine for animals classified as native fauna. Study co-author Dr. Corey Bradshaw said that governments have a responsibility to develop and implement management strategies for species considered native fauna, and that the classification of dingoes has serious consequences for the fragile ecosystems they inhabit. “In fact, dingoes play a vital ecological role in Australia by outcompeting and displacing noxious introduced predators like feral cats and foxes. When dingoes are left alone, there are fewer feral predators eating native marsupials, birds and lizards,” he said. “Dingoes can also increase profits for cattle graziers, because they target and eat kangaroos that otherwise compete with cattle for grass in semi-arid pasture lands.” The new research establishes that the dingo is genetically, phenotypically, ecologically, and behaviourally distinct from all other canids – on the same branch of the evolutionary tree as a wolf. “The dingo is without doubt a native Australian species,” said Dr. Bradshaw. ■

13 May: FME World Tour 2019, Melbourne, Victoria https://1spatial.com/au/event/fme-worldtour-2019-melbourne 21-22 May: GEO Business 2019, London, United Kingdom www.GeoBusinessShow.com 21 May: ESRI UK Annual Conference 2019, London, United Kingdom www.esriuk.com/en-gb/about/events/ac/ overview 11-14 June: HxGN Live 2019, Las Vegas, USA https://hxgnlive.com/2019 16-18 July: Global Mapper and LiDAR Module Training, Perth, WA www.bluemarblegeo.com/training/perth.php 23-25 July: Global Mapper and LiDAR Module Training, Sydney, NSW www.bluemarblegeo.com/training/ sydney.php 14 August: AIMS national conference, Sydney, NSW www.aimsconference.com.au 15 August: 15th Southeast Asia Survey Congress, Darwin, NT https://seasc2019darwin.com.au 17 September: Roads and Traffic Expo, Melbourne, Victoria www.terrapinn.com/roadsandtrafficexpo 28-30 October: Commercial UAV Expo Americas, Las Vegas, USA www.expouav.com

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The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

Publisher Simon Cooper Editor Daniel Bishton dbishton@intermedia.com.au National Advertising Manager Jon Tkach jon@intermedia.com.au Graphic Designer Alyssa Coundouris Prepress Tony Willson Circulation/Subscriptions Chris Blacklock Production Jacqui Cooper Subscribe Position is available via subscription only. A 12 month subscription (6 issues) is AUD$76.00. To subscribe visit www.intermedia.com.au, phone 1 800 651 422 or email: subscriptions@intermedia.com.au. Website www.spatialsource.com.au Position is published six times a year, in February, April, June, August, October and December by Interpoint Events Pty Ltd. ABN: 9810 451 2469 Address: 41 Bridge Road, Glebe NSW 2037 Ph: +61 2 9660 2113 Fax: +61 2 9660 4419 Editorial inquiries should be sent to: dbishton@intermedia.com.au Advertising inquiries should be sent to: jon@intermedia.com.au Ph: +61 2 8586 6128 Reprints from Position are permitted only with the permission of the publisher. In all cases, reprints must be acknowledged as follows: ‘Reprinted with permission from Position Magazine’, and must include the author’s byline. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the publisher. Supported by

Centennial reflection

his issue marks the 100th since the first Position magazine rolled off the presses in 2002. That first edition was the amalgamation of two publications, Measure and Map and GIS User, assembled by founding editor, Jon Fairall. The process of reviewing prior published material, and getting intimate with the genesis and history of the voluminous tools and techniques that we cover in this magazine has been a revealing, fascinating and exhausting undertaking. It’s humbling to comprehend earlier rigours of surveying practice, spatial analysis, aerial capture, the creation of bespoke, legacy GIS systems; marvellous to chart their historical, ongoing transformations. It’s been quaint and amusing to witness the results of Moore’s Law and other engineering advancements in miniaturisation retrospectively. But speaking with Jon, hearing from other seasoned experts and ploughing through thousands of pages of Position back issues has revealed a number of constants. Despite the flux wrought by technology’s unrelenting drive, the teeming hype of new revenue streams and emergent business models, there are recurrent themes and debates. Discussions about reaching out to convey full extent of spatial data’s transformative power to other industries date back to the beginning of this magazine’s run, and continue today – despite the number of sectors now crunching location data day-to-day. Vital discussions on diversity and the future of surveying, spatial and STEM disciplines as a whole are ever-present, with dynamic current initiatives charting a strong future. And while some of our number 0are more allergic to change than others, the industry y 2 19 pril/Ma has been uniformly steered tion Aby leaders with an almost clairvoyant business sense, si o p 30 technological nous and steadfast integrity. This tradition also remains intact. Geospatial practice in 2019 remains simultaneously agile and surefooted in all the sound and fury, able to respond to dramatic transformation and switchbacking trends with opportune, measured pivots that always seem to transcend the whiplash and vertigo that afflicts so many in other tech-adjacent fields. Underpinning this all is a spirit of unity and genuine community that has bred a culture of knowledge sharing, collaboration and cooperation across sectors that is unique. Be proud of our regional community and its innumerable achievements, and enjoy this milestone issue of Position. Daniel Bishton EDITOR

June/July 2019 – Issue 101 • Open standards – why the big players are embracing openness • UAV, AUV & UGV – the increasing ubiquity of unmanned systems in professional applications • Datums & dynamics – adapting for precision

NEXT ISSUE

Ad booking deadline: 17/05/2019 Ad material deadline: 22/05/2019 Publication date: 6/6/2019

www.spatialsource.com.au 7

news

Data61 launches Robotics Innovation Centre in Queensland CSIRO-owned entity Data61 has opened a purpose-built research facility for robotics and autonomous systems. The 600 square metre facility contains an open air UAV flying area, a 13 x 5-metre pool for testing AUVs, and the largest motion capture system in the Southern Hemisphere, used to validate data collected by robotics systems. According to Fred Pauling, leader of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems group at Data61, the centre represents a major expansion of research infrastructure for a market that is projected to be worth $23 billion by 2025.

Young Australians value STEM, but gender inequality persists A survey of over 2,000 Australians aged between 12 and 25 has found that most view STEM skills as important and valuable, but key disparities between genders remain. A survey of 2,092 students in December 2018 and January 2019 has found that most have positive attitudes towards STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. Eighty percent of survey participants agreed that ‘scientists make a positive impact on the world’, and a strong perception among respondents that possessing knowledge and skills in these subjects is important for future employment opportunities.

Nominations open for Year In Infrastructure 2019

Winners of the 2018 Year in Infrastructure awards.

8 position April/May 2019

Bentley Systems has called for nominations for its annual Year In Infrastructure awards program, open until April 30. A key event on the BIM calendar, Bentley’s Year In Infrastructure (YII) awards are a core component of its annual conference of the same name, with the 2019 event taking place in Singapore from October 21 through 24.

The awards are open to users of Bentley software, aimed at recognising ‘infrastructure projects for digital innovations that improve project delivery and/or asset performance.’ Nominations are called for across 17 infrastructure categories, as well as three special recognition categories.

SEASC returns to Australia, early bird closes 20th May It has been 20 years, but the South-East Asia Survey Congress heads back to Australia with a four-day event slated for Darwin this August. Organisers are calling SEASC19 a “must-attend event”, with a detailed program built around the inclusive theme of ‘Collaboration,

Communication and Capacity Building’. Hosted by SSSI and the ASEAN Flag Surveying nations, the 15th SEASC is to be held at the Darwin Convention Centre 15-18 August, drawing an expected 500 surveying and geospatial professionals from all over Australasia.

“SEASC 2019 Darwin is a one-of-a-kind opportunity for our survey and geospatial professionals to hear the important influences and trends in the surveying industry, across four great days,” said conference convenor and Surveyor General for Northern Territory, Rob Sarib.

Sarib says the ultimate outcome for the congress would be the ratification of a declaration or resolution. “This statement could identify and prioritise the challenges, and the necessary actions that will be required to ensure the sustainability of our profession, our relevance and value to the community, said Sarib. “In other words, it would set the foundations for our future.” He adds that the timing of the event will also give delegates a great opportunity to get a taste of the culture of the Top End. SEASC19 takes place at the same time as the annual Darwin Festival, which fills the city with cabaret, theatre, dance, visual arts and outdoor concerts under the stars . Early bird registration will save delegates $300 and closes 20th May.

www.spatialsource.com.au 9

news Aerobotics closes $US4m funding round

Aerobotics Co-founders James Paterson and Benji Meltzer.

Artificial intelligence-driven imagery analytics startup Aerobotics has closed a series A funding round worth $US 4 million. In an announcement indicative of the burgeoning growth in the agricultural analytics space, the startup announced the closing of the round at the opening of its new offices in Cape Town, South Africa. Aerobotics is built on a proprietary AI product that processes UAV- and satellitederived imagery to analyse health, pests, volume and other calculations down to the individual tree or vine level on agricultural plots.

Mitsui invests in Position Partners Mitsui & Co. has acquired a 20 percent holding in Position Partners in an effort to drive digital transformation in the construction and resource extraction sectors. Position Partners said in a statement that Mitsui’s investment opens the door to collaboration opportunities within the Mitsui network. Martin Nix, Position

Partners CEO, said it would allow them to offer greater value to their customers. “Mitsui’s reach and vision into global business optimisation is considerable and the company’s investment in Position Partners will assist us to identify and leverage technology that is evolving both within and beyond our core industries,” he said.

Smart helmet startup off to a flying star Sydney startup Forcite has closed a recent $1 million funding round as they prepare to trial their smart, sensor-laden motorcycle helmet on Australian roads. Alfred Boyadgis, founder & CEO of tech startup Forcite, very nearly didn’t live long enough to see this day. Coming off his motorcycle five years ago, his helmet

split in two, causing the attached action camera to come within a hair’s breadth of penetrating his skull. “Our innovative smart helmets feature the Forcite AI system that serves as a complete platform for the riding ecosystem, connecting motorcyclists to roads, communities and cities,” he said.

One of Fleet’s Proxima nanosatellites.

Kennards Hire announces IoT asset tracking initiative One of Australia’s largest equipment hire companies has kicked off a project to track its assets, in partnership with IoT company Fleet. Kennards Hire announced the partnership yesterday afternoon and will be one of the first to be connected to Fleet’s constellation of Centauri satellites. Telemetry data from rental equipment that is connected to Fleet’s satellite-enabled LoRaWAN network will allow movements to be tracked anywhere at anytime. Fleet recently announced plans to expand its coverage after booking out its initial service offering in 24 hours, and plans to launch another 10 nanosatellites by 2020.

10 position April/May 2019

Space agency signs MOU with ACT The Australian Space Agency has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the ACT government to cooperate closely on developing Australian spacereliant industries. The agreement will see the Adelaide-based agency and ACT government seeking to cooperate on quantum communications, deep space communications, design, test and qualification of

space hardware, space situational awareness, and space law. ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr MLA said the signing demonstrated his government’s commitment to supporting space industries, including critical infrastructure. “We want to ensure that the ACT’s own space industry can continue to grow with the support of the agency,” he said. Image: NASA/JPL.

Situational awareness in space Western Sydney University’s International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems (ICNS) has built a mobile event-based camera system that can deliver unprecedented temporal resolution when capturing objects in space. Director of ICNS Professor André van Schaik described the unit as a mobile space situational awareness (SSA) module.

The camera system developed by ICNS uses biologically-inspired eventbased cameras to overcome traditional limitations of exposure and saturation, allowing the AstroSite system to capture high-speed space phenomena during the day, from the ground. Such capabilities have obvious defence applications, with the AstroSite project’s development supported by the RAAF’s Project Jericho.

Event based Neuromorphic Space imaging mobile facility takes shape.

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news Artist’s impression of the future Square Kilometre Array in Western Australia.

Square Kilometre Array founders sign Intergovernmental treaty Australia joined six other nations in signing on to an international treaty to form the organisation that will oversee the delivery of the world’s largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array. The Square Kilometre Array, or SKA, will be the largest science facility on the planet, with infrastructure spread across three continents on both hemispheres. Its two networks of hundreds of dishes and thousands of antennas will be distributed over hundreds of kilometres in Australia and South Africa, with the headquarters in the United Kingdom. Australia, China, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and the United Kingdom signed the treaty in a ceremony in Rome, establishing the Square Kilometre Array Observatory. Karen Andrews, Australia’s Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, said the Convention will lead to decades of scientific and industrial outcomes. The organisation says more than $1.1 billion in contracts should start being awarded in 2020 as SKA comes to life.

Testing to ready drones for lunar cave mapping LiDAR equipped drones may soon be mapping caves on the moon and Mars, according to the SETI Institute and Astrobotics Technology, a space robotics startup. Testing a terrestrial drone and LiDAR system at the Lofthellir ice tube cave in Iceland, SETI Institute planetary scientist Pascal Lee said that caves in the lunar or martian environments could give shelter from inhospitable conditions on the surface: radiation, wide temperature swings and micrometeorite bombardment. “We went to Iceland to study a lava tube with massive amounts of ice inside it to understand better both the potential hazards and opportunities presented by the many lava caves we hope to explore on the Moon and Mars,” he said.

Lofthellir Lava Tube Ice Cave, Iceland. Courtesy SETI Institute.

POSITION’S NEWS ORIGINATES FROM Australia and New Zealand’s only site for surveying and spatial news. Subscribe now for your FREE weekly newsletter at www.spatialsource.com.au 12 position April/May 2019

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q&a

Q&A with Erin Peterson Making a splash last year was a groundbreaking citizen science project. As the ABC’s feature project during Science Week, the app allows amateur marine biologists to assist conservation efforts by classifying imagery from their mobile phone, and uploading their own. But behind this innovative approach to categorising data lies a highly sophisticated predictive mapping engine that is creating an extremely powerful spatial tool to aid management efforts on the Great Barrier Reef. We sat down with project lead, Dr. Erin Peterson, to find out more.

Position: Erin, welcome. Could you describe the motivation and intended outcome for this engaging, crowdsourced approach to data categorisation?

EP: We were interested in looking at innovative ways to monitor the Great Barrier Reef. The challenge is that it's just massive. It's 2, 300 kilometres long and contains something like 25,000 square kilometres of coral reefs. So it's just physically and financially impossible to go out and monitor coral on the ground comprehensively. In a lot of cases and environments you can monitor with high resolution, remotely sensed products, but because coral reefs are underwater, once you get a certain depth you can't you can't see them anymore, so you don't have that option of using remote sensing. So we were looking for a creative way to increase the spatial and temporal coverage of data on the Great Barrier Reef, so that the managers have better information to make more informed decisions.

14 position April/May 2019

Position: My assumption is that this classified imagery will be to help train a machine learning algorithm. Could you tell some specifics about how the inputs from users of Virtual Reef Diver will be used?

EP: Well, we’re not using machine learning, but you could. What you see online is the ‘citizen science’ face of it, but Virtual Reef Diver is really an innovative step in the way that we monitor and model the marine environment. With all the new technologies coming online, there are these high volumes of data coming in. So we've built a software platform that ingests data from multiple sources, and those sources might be from professional teams like the Australian Institute of Marine Science or university researchers, or these images that citizens can contribute and classify. Behind the scenes, that data is being manipulated and modelled automatically and then we predict the maps of coral cover, with estimates of uncertainty. So the idea is to create this automated platform, so that as data comes in, it can be modelled and used to make predictions based on the most up-to-date information possible. With hundreds of thousands of images coming in, humans are

the bottleneck in that workflow. So that's the real spatial science innovation here in terms of environmental monitoring. Position: In my opinion, it’s a stroke of genius to invite public involvement in this way. Where has the imagery been sourced from, and what processes are in place to validate users’ input?

EP: The citizen science data is just another data source, and so each of our data sources have different characteristics, whether they come from professional teams or citizens. The images have different extents, different quantities of points being classified, for example. When it comes to the citizen data, the quality of the classification is different. We know that people at home aren't always going to get the answer right, so we weight the data to account for the fact that it is collected using different methods and varying quality. Then we use a spatial statistical model to make predictions at a 500-metre spatial resolution, with estimates of uncertainty. This model is quite exciting because you know, as spatial scientists we know

that when you collect data in a certain place, it's most likely going to give you some idea of what's happening nearby, even if they’re places where you didn't go and sample. So we know that things that are related in space, and we can quantify that in a spatial statistical model that allows us to make better predictions in areas where we didn't sample. Position: How will the outputs of this model, within the larger project contribute to more comprehensive maps of the Great Barrier Reef?

EP: Right now we’ve made predictions from 2002 to 2015, but the system is designed to make updated maps as new data come in. So, the key issue we are trying to solve is that there are no publicly available coral cover maps of the GBR. Furthermore, some of the other models used to predict coral cover didn’t use all the available information. For example, a lot of the existing maps are generated based on the Australian Institute of Marine Science Long-term Monitoring Program or the Marine Monitoring Program, which revisit the same 135 sites every other year. So our map is currently the most comprehensive map of coral cover, the

only publicly available one and we make predictions at 500 square metre scale. So if you are monitoring and reporting, now you can summarise cover at different spatial scales – so at a reef, at a region or the whole of the GBR – and based on the most up-to-date information possible. You can really see how you’re doing with coral cover as a reef health indicator. Position: What will the primary use of these maps be, and how will they contribute to management and conservation efforts for the Great Barrier Reef?

EP: So, the monitoring that goes on now is specifically designed to look at trends at a few representative sites but it doesn't give us the big picture – the spatial heterogeneity that's going on and how it's changing on the reef. This information is really important when it comes to reef interventions, such as genetically modified coral. We can’t plant coral larvae everywhere, but we can seed reefs that are strongly connected to other reefs through ocean circulation. With

traditional resources, we don’t have a good idea of overall coral cover, which you need to carry out genetic connectivity modelling, monitor disease outbreak, crown of thorns starfish outbreaks and other types of analysis for this kind of intervention. The other key advantage of this new map is that it’s open – being publicly available, it means that people can use it in their own scientific projects or management problems that they're working on. Position: Fantastic, many thanks for your time Erin.

Erin Peterson will present a plenary at Locate19 at 10:25 am on Tuesday, April 9. ■ www.spatialsource.com.au 15

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Connecting Images from Space to Decisions on Earth The industry is pushing to get easier access to data and services via the cloud. Where is Airbus in this digital transition?

These past years, having seen our customers changing the way they work, we have pro-actively prepared our company to accompany them in this transformation. As our clients base their decisions on larger sets of data that is available, it is our duty to make data easily accessible and to help make sense out of it, which means providing easy tools to analyze data and extract the information they are looking for, such as change detection and temporal analysis, statistics, or object detection. We have also observed a growing demand for an open environment where entrepreneurs and companies can play with different geospatial components to build or complement their own services, may they be geo and non geo experts.To answer such market expectations, we are developing new services, new ways of doing business and new routes of going to market in order to deliver the actionable intelligence required by our customers. The OneAtlas Platform can be seen as the main hub of our digital offer.

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Question: OneAtlas seems to be the entry point to access many of your products and services, could you tell us more concretely what is behind The OneAtlas Platform?

The OneAtlas Platform is the cornerstone of providing easier access to constantly updated premium imagery and value added layers, including homogeneous 3D layers across the world, performing largescale image processing and extracting industry-specific insights. First, it is a gateway which enables easy access to qualified Airbus imagery layers within the Living Library as well as the Basemap and WorldDEM: • The Living Library provides premium satellite data from Airbus‘ multiresolution optical archive, updated on a daily basis, and immediately available via streaming, download and API. • The Basemap is a curated global imagery layer, updated annually and created from 1.5m and 0.5m resolution imagery. • The WorldDEM data gathered the global, homogenous WorldDEMTM and WorldDEM4Ortho datasets for 3D analytics and rendering, and are made available via streaming.

Together, the Living Library, Basemap and WorldDEM are powerful off-theshelf resources for imagery users and application developers. OneAtlas also combines premium imagery and industry-leading expertise to deliver Thematic Services, which are designed to provide industry-specific insights enabling users to make better informed decisions. OneAtlas offers analytics that include new change detection capabilities, which will allow areas of interest to be monitored and analysed using machine learning to automatically identify and count mobile assets as well as detect infrastructure changes. Ocean Finder is a Thematic Services for maritime-focused applications. It consists of a unique and innovative web-based platform that allows users to directly order satellite-based maritime detection and identification reports to help track ships and assets at sea. Additional Thematic Services include those to help serve Forestry and Precision Agriculture needs: Starling, a service that supports companies to monitor their forest impact with unprecedented

LEFT: WorldDEM™ Image Mount Fuji, Japan

accuracy; Verde, a brand new API service that delivers fine crop analytics with easyto-use vegetation maps. More Thematic Services are in development and will be added to The OneAtlas Platform soon. Q: We have seen a wide range of cloudbased offerings arriving on the market recently, mostly from start-ups and SMEs, what is different about OneAtlas from what is available on the market?

It is extremely motivating to be in an industry that is so hungry for innovation. In the long-run the companies that will be successful will be those that are able to deliver on their commitments and deliver what the customer requires. Airbus is well positioned in this market by virtue of our own capabilities, experience, long-standing customer relationships as well as a willingness to partner to deliver sophisticated offerings to fit customer needs across international markets. The key trend we have observed over the recent past is that we are moving from an era where applications were siloed, to a cross-collaborative ecosystem that drives success. There is no doubt that technology is increasingly making data more accessible and there is a general trend that data is less expensive. The challenge that we all face is how to make these enhanced capabilities provide services that are better valued. OneAtlas Data Services are the backbone that support this idea of cross collaboration. Our partners and customers can easily get instant access to data anywhere over the world in a matter of seconds. That user can then exploit the data to glean valuable information and insights for any application they choose.

Our data is available via streaming, download or API, offering flexible ways for users to integrate data into their workflow. OneAtlas is also helping to fuel the industry for innovation. OneAtlas not only provides data, but is an open environment that helps provide Thematic Services, Analytics and Partnership opportunities to an industry that is looking for insights and information to be derived in just a few clicks, all via cloud services. Coming soon, will be Earth Monitor, a change detection service in partnership with

BOTTOM: Automatic change detection results. Amsterdam, Netherlands

Orbital Insight that provides near realtime detection of infrastructure changes, car and truck counting, land use change and much more. These partnership opportunities fuse together the best assets of Airbus and our partners to provide valued services to our industry who is so hungry for innovation. For more information on OneAtlas, contact Jonah Williams with Airbus Defence and Space on 0418 217 576 or at jonah.williams@airbus.com. Information provided by Airbus Defence and Space. ■

www.spatialsource.com.au 23

feature

State of Play JON FAIRALL

ince the spatial industry’s initial development in the 1970s, its primary driver has been the same: users’ demand for a better understanding of the world. Especially in the early years, most of those users were bureaucrats in government, who saw in the technology the seeds of better decision-making. However, the technology was always limited by practitioners’ ability to turn the raw material of nature into images, graphs, maps and other useful media. There were limitations of hardware: hard drives were not big enough to hold the required databases; processors were not fast enough; screens were inadequate. There were limitations of software: proper spatial indexing was problematic; user interfaces were rudimentary. There were limitations in the data: it didn’t exist; if it did, it was in the wrong format; it wasn’t comprehensive; generating and collecting it was expensive. Many such limitations of hardware and software no longer exist. In fact, the processing capability that is now available is really quite extraordinary. Database technology has developed to the extent that peta- and exabyte-sized databases are, if not routine, at least no longer remarkable and quite adequate for all spatial information functions.

24 position April/May 2019

In a recent interview, Duncan Guthrie, the director of UK-based application developer 1Spatial, talked about current work with the British land information authority, Ordnance Survey (OS). OS has a nationwide database which is ‘product ready’. This means, he says, that at any given point in time, the data that is extracted from the database to form products for customers will include the latest edits to the database. There are 650 people working as editors, updating 313,000 features a day between them. This involves parsing 36 million features. All these changes are available overnight having been edited and validated according to OS rules. Or consider one response to Hurricane Harvey. Harvey vies with Katrina as the most costly storm on record. It meandered around the Carribbean before it came ashore on the US’ Gulf of Mexico coast in late August 2017, inflicting $125 billion in damage, mostly due to flooding. Some 30,000 people were displaced. In the wake of the wind, a consortium of insurance companies, the Geospatial Information Center (GIC), used a fleet of 13 aircraft to provide oblique and nadir images of the affected region. Ryan Bank, who leads the centre, says they flew for two and a half days during which time they produced 60 petabytes of data. This extraordinary effort was of enormous

benefit to insurance companies, who were able to verify damage reports even, in many cases, before claims arrived. Not only were claims settled very much faster than was previously the case, the cost of processing each claim was much reduced. At the very least, it was possible to divide properties into those that were destroyed, those that suffered marginal damage and those that were unharmed. The GIC has a new, Australia-specific offering launching at the Locate19 conference in Melbourne. The local chapter will be similarly owned by local insurers – will provide data that will cover 85 to 90 per cent of the population of Australia and New Zealand. Speaking to Position ahead of the conference, managing director Ryan Bank said his new offering would provide a paradigm shift for the industry – redefining both the insurance industry and the relationship between data suppliers and the government. At first blush it is difficult to see how this can be feasible – there are already numerous satellite and airborne remote sensing products that provide more or less consistent coverage on a national scale. But he points to an unusual business model. The GIC provides data to its owners, who share costs on a per capita basis, but it also provides data to relevant emergency organisations free of charge.

“The mobile telephone handset is now a central business tool. The projected number of connected devices is staggering: in 2020 we can expect this number to increase to over 20 billion. We need to configure our products and offerings accordingly.”

ABOVE: Glenn Cockerton, co-chair of the 2026Agenda. RIGHT: Ryan Bank leads the Geospatial Intelligence Center in the US, soon to launch in Australia.

The organisation provides a base image which can be compared with post-catastrophe imagery to provide damage assessments. This is obviously valuable to the insurance companies, dramatically reducing the cost of processing claims. Bank conceded that the system does not completely replace on-the-ground assessors, but it does reduce the number dramatically. Bank says that giving the data to emergency managers is a sound business decision. To the extent that first responders make a difference, they lessen insurers’ liabilities. In the Australian context, this could potentially completely alter the way state civil emergency services function. Bank says they have been having discussions with executives of the Emergency Management Spatial Information Network as well as other players in the emergency management community. The GIC offering may be an exemplar project, illustrating how businesses whoa re not traditional GIS users may access the fruits of spatial information by intelligently applied new models. But new technologies still have the ability to re-define the industry. Augmented reality hardware such as Microsoft’s Hololens promises to be truly disruptive in some industry sectors. So does surveying by drone. But still, the contemporary focus is not so much on the technology as the disconnect between the technology and its users. Full–scale GIS is too onerous for some emerging

opportunities – the search is on for better and more intuitive ways of presenting data to users, business models that are a better fit with customers’ businesses and deeper, more accessible analytics. The new trend takes many different forms. At one level, it is a matter of ergonomics: making the user-interface more readily available and more understandable. “Putting GIS tools into browsers is a key ability,” said Max

Ainscough, a GIS process analyst with Pitney Bowes. “Users should not need advanced GIS skills in order to extract meaningful data from a GIS.” This is a key understanding that will be central to the development of citizen involvement in Smart Cities during the next decade, which presupposes an informed citizenry. It is not only a question of matching the output of GIS with the expectations of consumers. It is also increasingly important in managing the employeremployee relationship. Ainscough argues that many people now entering the workforce have grown up with instant, slick, digital connectivity in all aspects of their lives. Their tolerance for clumsy interfaces or inadequate access to information at work is minimal. Pitney Bowes managing director Nigel Lester echoes the sentiment: “The mobile telephone handset is now a central business

www.spatialsource.com.au 25

feature The latest in rapid response manned aerial photography. A Diamond DA-42 Geostar aircraft, equipped with a Vexcel camera and Riegl laser measurement system.

tool. The projected number of connected devices is staggering: in 2020 we can expect this number to increase to over 20 billion. We need to configure our products and offerings accordingly,” he said. At another level, the central problem for spatial industry practitioners is to develop a closer match between the data and the knowledge required by workers. Jan Schoderer, the Asia-Pacific sales director at Vexcel Imaging says the ability to do relevant analytics on imagery is the driving force behind the industry’s demand for images, and thus his cameras. ‘An image on its own has a certain value perhaps, but to realise its potential, it needs to be embedded in a business process. The key is analytics.’ One could make the same argument about most of the fundamental databases that have been developed, with so much effort, by the industry over the last few decades. The bureaucratic view of this is perhaps best expressed in the 2026Agenda, a decadal work plan put together by some of the most significant bodies in spatial information. According to publicity put out by the leadership group, a key purpose of the 2026Agenda

26 position April/May 2019

“This year we are seeking for industry to capitalise on the national spatial infrastructure investments of the last two years to do new things.” is to ‘accelerate the provision of coordinated, open access, nation-wide, public spatial information and analytic tools that are easy to use, and facilitate data mining and interpretation for the benefit of all users’. Writing in the foreword to its 2017 plan, Angus Taylor, the (then) federal assistant minister for cities and digital transformation says the 2026Agenda: ‘provides the vision and direction to enable the spatial industry to deliver national and global services that will support the National Innovation and Science Agenda.’ NISA is a federal government plan to transform government processes by fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in the IT industry. Glenn Cockerton, who co-chairs the 2026Agenda, said that the flipside of all this is the overhead of the continusly high

rate of technical changes that demands constant management and adaptation. Even more significant, at least for some, is the explosion in sources of data and the fact that these data need to be made meaningful for users. Cockerton hopes that the number and diversity of organisations and individuals willing to drive change will accelerate in 2019. “This year we are seeking for industry to capitalise on the national spatial infrastructure investments of the last two years to do new things,” he said. “Also important will be the drive to connect to the emerging Australian space sector, and to enter new markets.” If this becomes the real focus of the industry over the next few years, it has the ability to change things profoundly. For companies in the industry, one of the take home messages of the 2026Agenda, says Glenn Cockerton, is that they need to stop thinking of themselves as GIS companies. “They need to be more entrepreneurial. We need to deliver services and solutions that society and government need,” he said. Jon Fairall is the founding editor of Position. ■

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100th edition

100th EDITION SPECIAL

A lot has changed since 2002. On Positionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 100th edition, in light of seemingly limitless innovations, gifted interventions and relentless evolution, we reflect on a handful of key technologies and developments that spurred reverberating change for surveying and geospatial practice.

100th edition LEFT: The market for UAV-ready laser scanners is booming. Pictured: Riegl’s VUX-240 and RiCopter. BELOW: Cyra Technologies’ Cyrax 2500 laser scanner, released in 2000. BOTTOM: Terrestrial laser scanners have become incredibly powerful, and considerably smaller. Leica’s BLK360.

Laser scanning F

irst cab off the rank in transformative technologies is laser scanning, a technology that has matured rapidly throughout Position’s history, permanently altering the landscape of surveying. Since the technique’s inception in the 1960s, laser scanners for engineering and surveying applications began to proliferate in the mid 1990s. One of the trailblazing systems produced for our industry was by Cyra Technologies, which was bought by Leica Geosytems in 2001 and continue to be a leader in the space. Craig Roberts, senior lecturer in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UNSW, recalls faculty’s acquisition of this cutting edge technology. “We purchased a Cyra laser scanner in 1999, one of the first in Australia I think – and it was about the size of a small dishwashing machine,” he said. Roberts said that beyond the rapid improvements in miniaturisation, resolution and speed throughout the 2000s, the integration with other tools transformed the devices into a staple of surveying kit. “One of the major advances was including a tilt sensor into the measurements. Prior to that, if the instrument was not level then corrections needed to be made post-processed. Even now I don’t believe every single measurement is corrected for tilt, as would be the case for a total station, but there are a range of techniques which automate this process at various levels of sophistication,” he said.

32 position April/May 2019

“Laser scanning has then been combined with IMUs, GNSS, odometers and tilt sensors to produce mobile mapping solutions which are hugely beneficial in long road and rail projects due their huge data volumes and reduced hazards for surveyors capturing the data.” Handheld scanners are now proliferate, compromising fidelity for access to challenging environments, and a range of units now sit between these and survey-grade equipment, propelled by BIM applications. Position reported on the use of handheld scanners by investigators in the aftermath of the Bali bombings in 2002, and has covered the development and application of this catalysing technology closely since.

Garry MacPhail, geospatial executive manager, Position Partners “Particular technologies stand out as fundamentally changing the surveyor’s toolkit. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, we saw a dramatic change from point-based surveying to string and line surveying, with a design laid out on a data collector. ‘One-man surveying’ emerged in the early 2000s with the refinement of robotic total stations, and by 2005, the standard toolkit we know today of a robotic, GPS base and rover and data collector was established. The first Bluetooth GPS unit, Topcon’s HiPer Lite, made the technology significantly less cumbersome. Alongside technology evolution, the role of the surveyor has shifted. On a road project, the surveyor has become the data manager across the site. Twenty years ago, when we first controlled a grader with a total station, the ‘pegless jobsite’ was defined as a new goal. Now we can see that reality. Our business has had a long-standing partnership with Position magazine since its inception. Other industries have a fragmented trade press, but Position magazine has managed to cut-through within our profession to be the industry standard nationally.”

Artist’s rendering of a GALILEO satellite.

Multi GNSS and CORS I

n the time since Position launched, satellite-based positioning has evolved from a futuristic, exclusive concept facilitated by bulky, boxy hardware to a consumer essential used mny times a day. In the intervening transformation, it has revolutionised the geospatial industry. In issue 2 of Position, authors quaintly theorised that GPS units to help track loved ones (children, specifically), may soon be ‘close to matchbox size’. Car-based GPS units were a rare and prestigious device. The expansion of state-aligned constellations of positioning satellites have contributed to this ubiquity – GALILEO coming online in 2006, Russia’s GLONASS system reaching full capacity in 2011, and the rapid development of China’s Beidou system are significant iterations in the expansion of satellite-based positioning services. But the real story is the developments in and ground-based infrastructure that have enabled the positioning precision that we currently enjoy. Craig Roberts of UNSW said that the development of ground infrastructure, along with the tireless work of the International GNSS Service in establishing standards and quality have enabled these services.

“The ground infrastructure, coupled with the range of constellations has enabled a number of services providing centimetre-level positioning globally, anywhere on Earth – that’s pretty astounding,” he said. “The services provided by the IGS enable many of these government based services such as AUSPOS, NRCan PPP and SNAP-NZ, along with the commercial services like CentrepointRTX, Veripos, Atlas, Starfire and Omnistar.” Garry MacPhail, geospatial executive manager at Sydney institution Position Partners, reflects on the product he’s seen mature. “Our AllDayRTK CORS network began in the mid-2000s and now covers vast areas of the country to enable high accuracy positioning,” he said. “Its usage is becoming increasingly widespread from farming, to transport and logistics, automated cars, Internet of Things and even the smartphones we all carry,” he said. We’ve enjoyed charting the ebb and flow of this critical technology over the years, and will continue to relay the news on the exciting developments that should flow from the government’s nearly $225 million commitment to positioning infrastructure in the 2018 budget.

Craig Roberts, School of Civil & Environmental Engineering, UNSW “Position magazine bridges the gap between academic journals and marketing brochures. It is an accessible place where surveyors can learn about the new work of their colleagues and be introduced to the world of geospatial and vice versa for the geospatial professional. It relies on the contributions of its readers, who likewise benefit from sharing their stories. To me the most significant developments during Position’s run are the astounding satellite geodesy missions that have been launched since 2003. They have elevated geodesy from a quirky extension of surveying to a fundamental framework of earth science supporting the IPCC reports on climate change. Who decides from where the sea level rises globally? What is the reference surface? Ask a modern geodesist. The gravity missions from Champ, GOCE, Grace and Grace-Follow on, have improved our understanding of the geoid, which is fundamental for heighting used by surveyors. But these missions now enable the sensing of mass movements in the Earth. However, it is hard to decipher these sensed changes in gravity and attribute these to the movement of groundwater (for instance - an important application) or some other effect. That’s still in the realms of geodetic science.”

www.spatialsource.com.au 33

100th edition

Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems D

rones, UAVs, RPAs, RPAS – whatever you’d like to call them, small aircraft have brought a step change in capability to the spatial industry. Whether it’s as a scanning tool, an untrammelled new source of imagery, or a means to maintain infrastructure assets that’s brought those golden tenders within reach – the benefits they promise and access to aerial competency they have delivered is difficult to understate. Back in Position issue 7, we featured an article on how the demand for aerial imaging for ‘tactical farming’ applications was not adequately met by satellite or manned aircraft sources. The article details DIY photogrammetry setups – one composed of a $200 model plane kit

and a point-and-shoot camera affixed to the fuselage with rubber bands. Despite that the resulting imagery served a key use case for agricultural imagery, the technology employed seems shockingly crude in light of the advanced aircraft now in the marketplace, bristling with an array of sophisticated sensor payloads. However, it pays to remember that large format digital cameras for manned aerial capture were first entering the Australian market in this era. Whilst initial forecasts held that these disruptive aircraft were a storm to damage the aerial imaging market irreparably, the record shows that the market thrived. The appetite for aerial imagery was whet by this newly lowered barrier to access,

Robert Kennedy, Director, CR Kennedy “Position Magazine has been instrumental in delivering news on the latest technological developments in the industry. Only 10 year ago, LiDAR scanners and drones were seen as cutting-edge technology. Now they’re seen as standard pieces of kit. Position Magazine has been an excellent source for demystifying these new technologies to the industry. The biggest change in the industry that I’ve seen is the digitisation of spatial data. No longer are single points recorded by hand in a notebook. Now, millions of points per second are recorded with LiDAR scanners. Digitisation has also allowed photogrammetry to move from a highly specialised, time consuming and expensive practise, to standard practise for spatial professionals at a much lower cost whilst achieving higher accuracies. We now see spatial professionals as not only being experts in data acquisition, but also in data management and in the interpretation of large data sets. With the digitisation of data, spatial data is now more accessible to more people than ever before. At the same time, demand for accurate spatial data has never been higher and will only continue to grow. The work of highly skilled spatial professionals is in more demand, across more industries, than ever before. There’s never been a better time to be a surveyor!”

34 position April/May 2019

giving many their first taste of what could be achieved. The burgeoning market for Australian aerial services has boomed with these new small craft in the fray, led by providers like AEROmetrex, Eagleview (formerly Spookfish) and Nearmap, whose core offerings have built on the parameters and dependability of full scale aerial surveying. Yet the unmanned craft have opened a whole new world of possibility. Multicopters can zip around treacherous sites where full size helis wouldn’t dare to hover, into the joints of overpasses, inside pressure vessels and inside and out of high-rise construction sites. The boom in imagery from UAVs has spurred new imaging markets and business models with cloud and AI-driven platforms for photogrammetry, feature and point cloud extraction, and powerful LiDAR scanners, optical, infrared and multispectral sensors are now available as potent payloads for the ubiquitous aircraft. RPAS are here to stay. ABOVE LEFT: DJI M600 Pro with Airsight Australia’s NextCore LiDAR sensor payload. BELOW: The early days of unmanned photogrammetry.

LEFT: A screenshot from Envision’s ‘Greening the Greyfields’ application, a CRCSI funded project, showing areas that may be suitable for redevelopment. BELOW LEFT: Eva Rodriguez and Phil Delaney of FrontierSI. BELOW RIGHT: Cows wear highprecision GPS tags at the launch of the SBAS testbed.

Graeme Kernich, CEO, FrontierSI

The CRC for Spatial Information I n late 2002, an announcement was made that would prove to be pivotal for the Australian geospatial industry. The federal cooperative research centre committee had approved the creation of a CRC for Spatial Information, slated for an initial $13 million of government funding, with commitments of partners worth $46 million ‘in kind’ along with a further $12.3 million in startup capital. After electing chair Peter Woodgate in May 2003, the CRCSI formally launched in July of that year. A key early project was the ‘43pl’, a mechanism for engaging SMEs in collaborations, established with 39 participating entities in the year of the CRC’s launch. Successfully raising another $15 million to sustain itself in 2007, the CRCSI-1 wound down in 2009 to continue its work at the nexus of research and industry afresh with CRCSI-2 from January 1, 2010. It was with this new era that the CRCSI delivered its formidable impact, punching out a total $1.07 billion in research impact since 2010, a benefit

of $3.13 for every invested dollar. In terms of research areas, $499 million of this investment was focused on feature extraction and rapid spatial analytics, $327 million on spatial infrastructures, and $111 million on positioning. The proof is really in the pudding. Flagship projects like the Australian Urban DEM Project, contribution in deforestation monitoring for the international Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) initiative, the SBAS industry testbed and Government Information Licensing Framework helped to build upon and cement a lasting legacy that proved the versatility and ubiquitous transformative power of spatial information and analysis in at the highest levels of government and industry. This record of achievement was further validated and rewarded with the transition into its current form of FrontierSI, Digital Earth Australia’s full funding, the formation of the Australian Space Agency and the landmark commitment to developing positioning infrastructure for Australia.

“The CRCSI set out in 2003 with daring ambition, one that would transform the spatial industry. This ambition was not ours alone. It was set and owned by the leading spatial thinkers from government, industry and academia and due to their mutual efforts and passion we were able to succeed. It has been continually energising to be a part of the spatial transformation of industry sectors. Conveying the value of spatial remains a constant challenge for us, but we are now seeing the impact that integrating spatial data in real time has for business and community, which makes this message an easier proposition. Position magazine has been a part of the spatial journey for a long time and its balanced reporting of our industry’s progress is a credit to its team. There are now large data infrastructure initiatives on the agenda across Australia and New Zealand, which will improve data acquisition, dissemination and use. The task before us all is to be bold in bringing these datasets together in a way that collectively transforms our verticals and capitalises on future opportunities. We will do this by continuing to embrace the strength of our connections and relationships. I am proud that our sector has, for the past 15 years, built a reputation for coming together to work on shared solutions for shared problems.”

www.spatialsource.com.au 35

100th edition

Web services T

hough it’s difficult to recall, there was a time before the internet. Maps used to be paper resources, with decadal update cycles, not real-time dynamics. Way back in those dark ages, the digitalisation of maps was a painstaking and time-consuming procedure in itself, one for which a small ecosystem of specialised service providers formed an Australian market for this technical, niche process. In building geographic information systems (GIS), they also required businesses, councils and government departments to build enormous, costly databases to handle this massive amount of data, legacy systems that needed to be designed and built at great cost, fed storage capacity and maintained and upgraded over time.

The advent of web services in the early 2000s changed the management of digital maps and the power of spatial data forever – even if the impact wasn’t fully felt yet, the rise of web services would sound the death knell for legacy systems. Evolving from the remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism in the distributed computing environment (DCE) throughout the 1990s, the technique really took off with the extensible markup language (XML)-based system, XML-RPC, which utilised the open hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) to transfer requests for data between servers – meaning that text-based data could be exchanged, inspected, and transformed via readily available, open free tools. The launch of Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET in 2002, which embedded these

PSMA Australia’s Gescape database has a range of live attributes accessible in machine readable form via its Buildings API – an evolution of web services.

ABOVE: Typical .NET GIS applications circa 2003.

techniques in a booming object-oriented software development environment, helped accelerate this into the mainstream and supercharged the development of business-critical web applications. This shift to client-server architecture this caused meant that ‘organisations that use the data no longer had to worry about the infrastructure to store it,’ as reported in Position 5, 2003. This development ultimately facilitated the move to hosted, horsepower-on-tap services like AWS, and the rise of web-based GIS services, the now-proliferant architecture for so many users of GIS and spatial services – which can now facilitate access to massive, 3D models and realtime access to incredibly rich databases via APIs.

Dan Paull, CEO, PSMA Australia “Position magazine is a stalwart of the geospatial industry. Interestingly, it’s about the same age as PSMA. We’ve provided analytics-ready geospatial datasets for about 20 years and Position has reported geospatial trends and the industry’s response to them for about the same time. The technology change we’ve seen over this same period has been rapid. Some technologies are revolutionary, because the magnitude of the change they drive impacts the entire world economy. The digital age has fundamentally altered our industry and its future role. We have big data. And lots of it - 90% of the world’s data was created in the last 12 months! Autonomous sensor platforms, sensor networks and a rapidly expanding Internet of Things increase the speed of capture and richness of location content. We have cloud capability. Incredible computing power, vast storage and whole software stacks are now available on-demand, pay-as-you-go – providing access to capability that few could afford a decade ago. We have AI – machine vision and deep

36 position April/May 2019

learning are dramatically changing image recognition and feature extraction, while multi-use launch vehicles, or rockets (love rockets), slashed the cost of putting satellites into space and capturing imagery. We want to know more, to be better informed, but it’s a paradox – one can be trapped under the weight of increasingly more data. PSMA has tried to combat this by leveraging the technologies above, bring structure and confidence to location data with our GNAF and Geoscape products. Mainstreaming geospatial data requires innovation and a focus on customer experience. But regardless of who you are, you’ll never have all the necessary ‘smarts’ within your organisation. Collaboration is essential if you want to innovate, because you need diverse views. It’s collaboration that Position has helped build in the geospatial industry in Australia over its 100 issues.”

The Australian Space Agency I

n 2008, a report titled ‘Lost in Space – Setting a new direction for Australia’s space science and industry sector’ was published by the Senate Standing Committee on Economics. As the only OECD country without a space agency, the report carried significant weight and pulled no punches in detailing the loss of economic opportunity represented by this departmental vacuum, with no institution to advocate for and negotiate Australian society and industry’s extraterrestrial needs on international launches and space infrastructure. Being second class citizens in space meant that we were far from leveraging the immense, versatile utility of satellites in a country of massive spatial distribution. The establishment of the Space Policy Unit and three-year Australian Space Research Program

The Australian Space Agency has a mandate to help facilitate more frequent Australian payloads on international missions before local launch infrastructure is operational.

helped kick-start Australia’s ‘new space’ sector, and helped incubate space-adjacent startups and R&D initiatives, the brightest stars of which are based in South Australia – which of the states, led the fiercest lobbying campaign for the agency. As the chorus of voices calling for a national agency became deafening, the announcement was made at the International Astronautical Congress 2017 in Adelaide, where the agency is now based. Formed as of July 1 2018 with an initial spend of $41 million, the Australian Space Agency has been recognised in the US House of Representatives, busy finding homes for Aussie payloads on international missions, kicking off state partnerships and advancing the aims of space-reliant businesses and aspiring launch facilities in the Northern Territory and South Australia.

ABOVE: New Zealand’s Rocket Lab has been successfully deploying satellites to orbit from local launch facilities.

Jon Fairall, founding editor, Position “We produced the first issue of Position in November 2002. The first article concerned itself with the state of the GIS industry – things weren’t going too well, apparently. You might think that nothing has changed – but it has. In 2002, aerial surveying was still largely a film-based enterprise. Leica and Intergraph were competing with firstgeneration digital cameras but the industry would remain unimpressed for another five years. GNSS positioning was in its infancy. Selective Availability of GPS – the intentional degradation of the signal -- was only turned off in May 2000. Coverage was still not ubiquitous, GLONASS satellites were falling out of the sky, and Beidou was still just an idea in the minds of ambitious Chinese electrical engineers. Mobile phones were ubiquitous in 2002, but they really were just phones. We had to wait until 2007 for the release of the iPhone and the possibility of using such devices to take GIS into the field. Even then, it took software engineers quite a while to shoehorn their products into such small format devices. In 2002, the main elements of the Spatial Data Infrastructure were beginning to emerge. The first iteration of G-NAF was released in May 2003. Later that year, the Spatial Business Association applied for funds to build the first interoperability demonstrator. Many surveyors were worried that the new technology would change the nature of their profession – and it did. Some things really haven’t changed.”

www.spatialsource.com.au 37

q&a

Q&A with Rod Bryant In developing our feature on the state of play for autonomous vehicles in Australia for Position 99, we became intrigued by the bleeding edge of absolute positioning technology, and it’s application in the autonomous road transport environment. We sat down with Rod Bryant, Senior Director of Technology in the Positioning Product Centre at u-blox, to get an insider’s perspective on the complexities of highly accurate positioning systems for the road.

38 position April/May 2019

Position: Hi Rod, thanks for being with us. Let’s start at the top: what are the key applications for high precision GNSS and IMS positioning in increasingly automated road transport?

RB: GNSS is a potentially critical sensor for use in autonomous road transport because it’s the only sensor available offering absolute position. All other sensors used in vehicle automation offer relative position only. Radar and ultrasonics may be used to provide distance to adjacent vehicles and obstacles, LiDAR and vision offer means to identify and estimate distance to landmarks – but only GNSS can place the vehicle directly on the map. On multi-lane roads in urban areas, though not deep in the ‘urban canyons’,

accuracy of decimetres typically, and 1-metre (95 percent of the time) is achieved by u-blox’s lane accurate positioning solution, which involves dual band high precision GNSS coupled with a 6-degree-of-freedom Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and wheel sensors. This is accurate enough for GNSS to be used in conjunction with other sensors for lane keeping. GNSS is far more critical for identifying the road segment that the vehicle is on. For example, it can be used to distinguish between a road and an adjacent slipway or ramp, or between two roads stacked vertically. For this

application, other sensors are far less useful and hence the GNSS position is required to be highly reliable. For this application, the receiver must report not just its location but also an upper limit on the error known as a Protection Level. Another area in which GNSS is critical is for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communications, being introduced using a special version of WiFi (according to the IEEE802.11P standard) and using cellular communications. The primary uses of V2V and V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) communications are to provide warnings for oncoming vehicles, of braking ahead and so on. Many of these use cases are being enabled or enhanced by exchanging vehicle location and speed, thereby allowing closing distance and rate of closing to be calculated within the vehicle to anticipate potential collisions. Position: Could you describe the main challenges related to integrating these technologies into a safe, fit-forpurpose system, in terms of technical shortcomings and integration with landmark-based positioning systems?

RB: GNSS in urban areas is heavily affected by obscuration caused by buildings, overpasses, trees and so on. This leads to restricted view of the sky which results in poor geometry (not enough angular spread amongst the satellites for good accuracy). GNSS is even more subject to the effects of reflections (multipath) from buildings, trees, overhead signs, tunnel entrances and so on. As a result, standard precision (codephase based) GNSS is typically limited in accuracy to between five and 10 metres, even when used in conjunction with wheel sensors and inertial sensors. High precision (i.e carrier phase based) GNSS is capable of centimetre accuracy under good conditions but, more importantly, it is far more immune to multipath effects. However, carrier phase based positioning is difficult and, in the past, has been prohibitively expensive for mass market applications such as automotive applications. Mass market GNSS receiver manufacturers like u-blox have the potential to adapt the designs of GNSS chips that are produced in high volume in order to bridge the gap. For u-blox, this has required a major investment in specialised engineering resources and inhouse development in order to be able to offer a complete solution. For others, the approach appears to be partnering with existing high precision GNSS players. Furthermore, for carrier phase based positioning to be useful in the urban environment, it must cope with very frequent obscuration of signals. This

GNSS is far more critical for identifying the road segment that the vehicle is on. For example, it can be used to distinguish between a road and an adjacent slipway or ramp, or between two roads stacked vertically. means that the convergence time must be very short. Without going into details, this demands dual band operation and the use of Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) corrections rather than just precise point positioning (PPP) corrections as are typically associated with dual band GNSS receivers. The conventional way of supplying RTK corrections is far too cumbersome for mass market applications, as it requires twoway communication between the receiver and the server. A broadcast scheme such as SSR-RTK is needed instead, and such services are being pioneered largely driven by this application. As mentioned above, for some use cases, a high integrity receiver is required (i.e. one that provides protection levels). A protection level is an upper limit on the positioning error that must be provided for each of the across-track, along-track and vertical directions. The probability that the error will exceed the protection limit must be lower than a specified value called the integrity risk. Typically, this value is somewhere in the range from 1 in 1,000 per hour down to 1 in 10,000,000 per hour. Not surprisingly, this is only feasible because the alert limits, or thresholds on the protection limits applied by the system are several metres rather than, say, one metre.

Aviation GNSS receivers have been subject to such requirements for many years. However, the automotive use case is vastly more complex for the following reasons: 1. In aviation, the receiver operates in a benign environment with the only sources of multipath being the aircraft body itself. Hence the primary sources of large measurement errors are malfunctions in the satellites themselves, which are inherently very rare and can be assumed not to occur simultaneously. In the automotive environment, multipath is the primary source of large and frequent measurement errors. 2. In order to eliminate the potential for small bias errors in the measurements to build up into large position errors, aviation receivers typically compute position using what is known as a single epoch least squares solution. The previous position is ignored. In the automotive application, the required accuracy demands a filtered solution and, typically, a Kalman filter is employed. Hence, the probability of small measurement biases can't be ignored. 3. Aviation solutions use code-based positioning whereas the automotive application demands a carrier-phase based solution. This introduces another source of error that is particularly difficult to handle when computing the protection limit and that is ambiguity error. Carrier phase measurements are inherently ambiguous. We know the carrier phase but not, initially, the number of carrier wavelengths between the receiver and the satellite. Luckily, techniques for solving such problems were devised many years ago. However, such solutions can be subject to failure and the protection limit calculation must take account of the probabilities associated with ambiguity errors. www.spatialsource.com.auâ&#x20AC;&#x192; 39

q&a 4. In addition to the ambiguity errors, high precision GNSS makes use of RTK or SSR-RTK correction services to correct the systematic errors from the satellites and the atmosphere. These are subject to integrity risk which must also be taken into account. 5. Aviation receivers also do not make use of additional sensors whereas, for the automotive application, the use of an IMU and wheel ticks is required. This brings in further error sources that must be accounted for. 6. Finally, points 1 and 3 above involve highly non-Gaussian error distributions which are far more difficult to analyse than the Gaussian errors that dominate the aviation GNSS application. The solution for the above six points and more is still being evolved, but inevitably involves the large scale

This is another example of where GNSS is proving essential, as I understand that GNSS-based positioning is typically used for sensor calibration in these systems. Position: In your view, will highly automated vehicles rely on a mix of absolute- and landmark-based positioning technologies, or is there foreseeable scope for one category to usurp the other?

RB: In order to distribute risk I see a combination of GNSS-based and landmark-based positioning being used together for the foreseeable future. Position: Are there any specific challenges (or milestones) associated with the Australian environment that are notable in your view?

characterisation of errors and the development of adaptive error models. Another problem to be overcome is the inadequacy of road mapping. Autonomous driving will require featurerich maps with decimetre level accuracy. Such maps are being developed, but at enormous cost. It seems clear that the maintenance of such maps will not be possible at the required update rate and some sort of crowdsourcing approach may be needed. Again GNSS-based absolute positioning will be at the core of such a scheme. At this stage in the evolution of autonomous automotive systems, the OEMs are, for the most part, keeping the sensor fusion to themselves. The primary reason is that they want to use multiple sensor systems as cross-checks against each other which allows them to distribute their risks amongst the sensors. If the sensors were more closely integrated it would be far more difficult

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Position: Are you aware of key challenges associated with landmark-based positioning, vehicle mounted sensors?

RB: Like all jurisdictions, the pace of regulatory change is lagging technology development in this area and will likely set the pace. I see the sheer size of the Australian land mass as something of a problem for our relatively small population. Luckily, most of our population is concentrated in a small number of major cities. I see such centres as being provided with accurate commercial GNSS correction services, while the regions may not be well enough served to facilitate lane accurate GNSS-based positioning. That said, the government has committed to a world leading multi-GNSS SBAS service that will serve the entire continent via GNSScompatible signals. That is a step in the right direction, but what is really needed is a true SSR-RTK correction service which I believe is under consideration.

RB: One of the key challenges is the need to calibrate these sensors for mounting errors and issues with the sensors themselves.

Position: Many thanks for your time and insights, Rod. â&#x2013;

to assign risk to individual sensors. The penalty for this independence is reduced performance and therefore, we should expect an evolution towards tighter integration eventually. Two examples of how this could lead to improved performance include: 1. By allowing the GNSS to work closely with the landmark-based positioning solutions, it should be possible to calibrate out the slowly varying biases in the map registration that commonly afflicts road mapping. 2. Visual odometry (i.e. motion sensing) could be used in conjunction with GNSS and inertials to reduce the effects of inertial drifts.

Sponsors

Must do’s

Your conference checklist

ATTEND THE PLENARIES

LEARN SOMETHING NEW It’s highly unlikely you’re familiarised with each of the streams on offer, so why not learn about Geospatial Intelligence, the Start-Up Revolution or Sustainability Resilience?

There are more than ever this year, and just as many not to be missed. The plenaries take place on the morning of Tuesday 9 April as well as the afternoon of the Wednesday 10 April.

CONSULT WITH AN EXPERT (FOR FREE)

FIND OUT HOW REAL REALITY MODELLING IS

Many exhibitors and delegates are specialist consultants or academics that could be very expensive to speak to otherwise. Take the opportunity to make a valuable connection and learn from these industry leaders. Market Day on Monday 8 April is open to all.

EXPERIENCE THE LATEST IN VR VXLab is a multi-disciplinary virtual laboratory connecting visualisation and automation facilities in RMIT and industry. There’s not one but two VXLab tours taking place at Locate19. Make sure you’re registered to attend - Users explore collaborative experimental design, operation and testing of global cyber-physical systems.

ENJOY CANAPÉS & BEVERAGES OVER A LAUGH

Speak to the likes ofAWS, Eagleview, Mangoes Mapping, Vexcel Imaging, Bentley, DELWP, Sphere Drones, Airbus & Anditi to discover the amazing things being done with spatial data.

NEW FEATURE! There is a great opportunity to harness the energy of Locate to establish and promote the value of geospatial services across a variety of sectors. The Hub, supported by ThinkPlace, will offer an opportunity for delegates, exhibitors, industry bodies, government, academia and nonspatial experts to engage and collaborate. Georabble will be taking place in The Hub during the Welcome Reception – who doesn’t love free canapés & beverages?! Make sure you’re there!

USE THE APP Plan ahead, choose which presentations will interest you and share your discoveries on social media.

KEEP TABS ON UP-ANDCOMERS Attend the APSEA awards dinner on 9 April to mingle with the best in the business and see who you will be hearing a lot more about over the coming years.

Geospatial Meetup group GeoRabble will be hosting their free event during the free Locate Market Day on Monday 8 April. Georabble involves sharing short, sharp, commercial free stories from a range of presenters, as well as quizzes, prizes and networking opportunities.

INTRODUCE YOURSELF There will be all types of people at Locate and just as many opportunities. Speak up and you might find your next client, employee or just make a new friend.

www.locateconference.com/2019 Sponsors

Media Partners

new products

Waymo’s Laser Bear Honeycomb LiDAR.

Waymo to sell LiDAR sensors Google’s sister company Waymo has announced that it is making available its powerful LiDAR sensors for use other than self-driving vehicles. The new sensor, which Waymo is calling the Laser Bear Honeycomb, is typically found on the bumpers of its autonomous vehicles, but select partners will now be able to purchase them to explore other uses. Waymo’s LiDAR unit has a vertical field of view (FOV) of 95 degrees – significantly wider than the standard lidar's 30-degree FOV – and a 360-degree horizontal view. Waymo claims it has the same vision capabilities of three lesser 3D sensors stacked on top of one another.

First commercially available autonomous aerial robot for underground mine mapping Exyn Technologies, Inc. has announced the commercial availability of its Autonomy Aerial Robots (“A3Rs”), what the company calls the first and most advanced fully autonomous aerial system for data collection in GPSdenied environments. Dundee Precious Metals (DPM), a publicly traded Canadian-based international mining company, selected Exyn as its technology partner to advance its initiative for digitisation

and automation of its underground gold mining operations. “The Exyn A3Rs allow frequent and hi-resolution mapping of underground environments while reducing risks to personnel. We are very excited at the results of the maps we are seeing,” says Theophile Yameogo, Vice President Digital Innovation, DPM. Exyn's A3Rs are driven by proprietary software that enables full autonomy for aerial robots.

Maptek releases cold weather stability monitoring station Maptek has launched a cold climate variant of its Sentry stability monitoring system for mining operations. The Sentry product is an autonomous, mobile unit that provides constant measurement of ground movement through high resolution laser scanning, offering real time analysis and reporting. The new model features an XR3 cold climate laser scanner, which allows this version of the Sentry system to operate continuously in a temperature range of -20 to +50 degrees Celsius, and limited intervals of operation below -20 degrees.

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MicaSense, senseFly team up Fixed-wing drone maker senseFly and MicaSense, a leading producer of drone sensors, have announced the senseFly eBee X with MicaSense RedEdge-MX, which the companies are calling a new dual solution for efficient, in-depth crop analysis. According to the companies, the new solution enables farming, agricultural science, forestry and environmental protection professionals to gain valuable multispectral crop insights more

efficiently than with slower, smallercoverage multirotor drones. “This seamless, integrated professional drone offering represents an obvious upgrade path for many agricultural professionals. Customers who already use MicaSense’s RedEdge-MX, for example, now have a quicker, more efficient way to analyse the health of their crops, without having to compromise on data quality,” said Eric Waters, general manager of MicaSense.

Honeywell, Airmap developing UAV air traffic control

HoloLens 2 powers next generation of BIM tools Microsoft’s next-generation mixed reality headset dropped with major fanfare earlier this year at MWC Barcelona, formerly the Mobile World Congress. There’s a lot riding on Microsoft’s new mixed reality device. Aimed at enterprise, the next-generation wearable headset comprises a suite of evolutionary improvements over the debut model, which appears to be far better-placed to deliver upon the augmented reality promise.

The HoloLens 2 doubles the fieldof-view of the original unit whilst maintaining the same pixel density of 47 pixels per degree, and whilst not a whole lot lighter, the headset’s centre of gravity has now been shifted to behind the wearer’s ears. Showcasing the new customisation suite and partnership program, Trimble and Bentley concurrently announced new mixed reality tools based on the Hololens 2.

Yuneec’s H520 hexacopter.

Honeywell have partnered with UAV airspace management company AirMap to develop a cost-effective drone tracking solution to provide airspace safety authorities with situational awareness of manned and unmanned aircraft operations within an airspace system. Together, the companies will develop a cost-effective hardware device to allow for unmanned aerial systems (UAS), or drones, to maintain consistent communication with a UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system. The tracker device is currently available as a proof of concept for testing. Image: Courtesy of Airmap.

FARO rolls out Zone 3D 2019

FARO Zone 3D 2019.

Yuneec International, Mobilicom offer new UAS solutions UAV and aircraft maker Yuneec International has partnered with Mobilicom to offer the enterprise and government markets new advanced solutions for their unmanned aerial needs. The cooperation focuses on the development of two commercial and government drone solutions, based on Yuneec´s commercially proven H520 hexacopter, well-known for its high reliability, safety and precision, and

Mobilicom´s innovative SkyHopper and LTE technology. Both UAS solutions, which will be called H520 SkyHopper and H520 SkyHopper LTE, will incorporate high-end cyber security and encryption, dedicated frequencies and interference-avoidance capabilities, and will be offered as customizable, flexible and scalable end-to-end solutions.

FARO has released a new version of its Zone 3D software platform. The FARO Zone 3D 2019 is specifically designed to enable investigators and security professionals to enhance the quality of site and evidence capture, documentation, reconstruction and analysis for crime, crash, fire and security applications. FARO Zone 3D 2018 was the first VR-enabled software solution for law enforcement and forensics professionals that provides a comprehensive platform for documenting, analysing, and reconstructing scenes that includes powerful forensic analysis, 3D diagramming and animation tools. FARO says the 2019 release builds on functionality of its predecessor and offers immersive and dramatic new ways to interact with and present forensic scenes. Image courtesy of FARO.

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sssi

News and views from the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute

SSSI Board – 2019 President – Dr. Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse President-Elect – Paul Digney NSW Director – Wayne Patterson NT Director – Rob Sarib QLD Director – Lee Hellen SA Director – Franco Rea TAS Director – Paul Digney VIC Director – Richard Syme WA Director – Kerry Smyth ACT Director – Vacant Hydrography Commission Director – Richard Cullen YP representative (Observer) – Roshni Sharma Company Secretary – Jonathan Saxon, Peter Olah

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SSSI CEO Peter Olah

CEO’s report

ithin the next three months, a federal election will take place. You’ll hear the usual promises from all sides, and the solemn commentariat telling us how this is “the most important election in a generation”. This hyperbole is rarely true and probably will not be this time either. What is true is that big change is afoot. If the trend of published polling is to be believed, then we will have a new Shorten ALP government with a large majority in the lower house, and strong Senate numbers. Their announced policies to date – especially some of their fiscal and financial services changes – will be far reaching. On the other hand, if the Coalition manage to defy the odds and win another term in government, it will be very different to the last seven years with nearly half the frontbench departing from politics. Either way, the government of the next three years will stand apart from what we have seen for many years. This matters to us at SSSI, because every one of our members – every professional in surveying and spatial – is impacted every day by government as a legislator, regulator, policy maker, licensor, purchaser and employer. In our fragmented industry, government has more power to shape our world than any individual or company.

A big part of our job as the national voice of surveying and spatial professionals is to inform, advise, convince and shape government decisions and directions in ways which make the professional lives of our members better, smoother, and more productive and effective – for them, and for Australia. This takes good, consistent advocacy, and it takes good policy. This is why we have been working hard for the last six months on drafting our first national public policy document. This will be the document that answers several big questions: • What does SSSI stand for? • What do Australia’s surveying and spatial professionals need governments to do to improve and free the industry to achieve its full potential? • What does that “full potential” look like? Since October last year, workshops have been run within the SSSI Board and with every Regional Committee and Commission to seek input to the document. We have also consulted in a number of other forums to maximise the breadth of input. As I write this, we are in the final stages of drafting the document which will be completed in April. I look forward to presenting it as a comprehensive plan across all sides of politics, on behalf of all SSSI members and the broader surveying and spatial community.

SSSI sustaining partners

President’s report

Commission Chairs Engineering & Mining Surveying Chair Andrew Edwards chair.emsc@sssi.org.au

wish to take the opportunity to highlight some of the work taking place at SSSI relating to our young professionals. There is a constant discussion in our industry about skills shortages, succession planning, training pathways, the need to increase the profile of our profession to students and their parents etc., and SSSI is actively working to help address a number of these issues.

Hydrography Commission Chair Richard Cullen chair.hc@sssi.org.au Land Surveying Commission Chair Lindsay Perry chair.lsc@sssi.org.au Remote Sensing & Photogrammetry Commission Chair Petra Helmholz chair.rspc@sssi.org.au

South East Asia Survey Congress (SEASC) 2019 Poster Competition Young professionals (or young-at-heart professionals!) are invited to submit a poster on the theme: “My story: how I came to be here”, highlighting their journey to the spatial profession. Posters will be on display at SEASC, with preliminary judging by the local primary school, high school and University students as well as conference attendees, and final judging by a panel of young professionals from the SSSI National Young Professionals Committee. Submissions close on 9 August 2019.

SSSI National Young Professional Mentoring Program After great success in 2018, expressions of interest are now open for the 2019 National YP Mentoring Program, an ideal opportunity for students to gain personal access to experienced and engaged professionals in the surveying and spatial science arena.

Geospatial Information Competition I am so very pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Geospatial Information Competition – Lizzie & Micah from Nowra Christian College! This competition, open to students from years 7-10 across Australia, helped demonstrate the importance of geospatial science in an increasingly complex world. The winning team receive $1,000 and will be visiting the upcoming Locate19 Conference and Asia-Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards in Melbourne.

UNGGIM-Arab States Meeting & Geosmart India I had the opportunity to participate in the United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management Meeting of the Arab States in Jeddah and the Geosmart

Spatial Information & Cartography Commission Chair Kerry Smyth chair.sicc@sssi.org.au

Regional Committee Chairs

SSSI President Dr Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse

India Conference in New Delhi as part of my work. I noted the leaders of both events are emphasising a need for certification of professions or licensing of geospatial and surveying Professionals in respective regions. Governments and the private sector want to procure suitable and qualified professionals who have undergone an assessment that they can confidently trust.

International Women’s Day Celebration SSSI National and Regional groups proudly hosted or participated in the International Women’s Day celebrations across the country. SSSI firmly supports gender balance in the profession and its operations. The inclusion and diversity actions remain at the centre of our SSSI values. SSSI Board and leaders are committed to having gender equality at our boards, regional committees and operations going forward. At Locate19, convenors Katherine Williams and Glen Cockerton along with the organising team have developed a plenary speakers programme with 50% of lead female speakers. I would like to congratulate the Locate19 team on this achievement. As always, feel free to contact me or any of the SSSI staff if you have any queries, feedback or suggestions. Dr Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse President SSSI

ACT Regional Chair Noel Ward chair.act@sssi.org.au NSW Regional Chair Gaby van Wyk (Interim Chair) chair.nsw@sssi.org.au NT Regional Chair Rob Sarib chair.nt@sssi.org.au QLD Regional Chair Paul Reed chair.qld@sssi.org.au SA Regional Chair Franco Rea chair.sa@sssi.org.au TAS Regional Chair Paul Digney chair.tas@sssi.org.au VIC Regional Chair Lindsay Perry chair.vic@sssi.org.au WA Regional Chair Lesley Arnold chair.wa@sssi.org.au SSSI National Office 27-29 Napier Cl, Deakin, ACT 2600 (PO Box 307) Phone: +61 2 6282 2282 Email: support@sssi.org.au

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sssi

Hydrography Commission report

AHSCP Scheme - International Reaccreditation The new guidelines and associated documentation required to bring the AHSCP’s internationally recognised hydrographic certification scheme up to the new S5A and S5B standard has been delivered to the International Board on Standards of Competence for Hydrographic Surveyors and Nautical Cartographers (IBSC) for renewal. The IBSC has required a member of the AHSCP attend their meeting and present the package formally on the 25th of March in order that they may freely ask questions. Once the updated scheme documentation has been approved, there will be a transition period from the current process to the new as many would have begun their experience log preparation as far back as 4 years ago and mapping has been conducted to the old S5 syllabus version 11. There are significant changes to the syllabus, updating knowledge and practice to current technologies and methods in use but yes, still retaining core principles, maths and traditional techniques. While mapping in the experience log for Level 1 will be primarily from the S5A, S5B will still be a major consideration as it reflects the practical application which is a consolidating activity to demonstrate competence. Level 2 will be assessed under S5B.

The Hydrography Commission and AHSCP are continuing to assess the “sea time” component of modern hydrographic surveying due to the use of remote survey equipment but need to temper this with finding the median between too much shore based remote activity and having the individual in the maritime environment gaining appreciation of climatic and physical variations of a survey area and other marine interactions. Further consideration of this element will be conducted at the next joint Face-toFace meeting in April.

Hydrographic Survey Education As many have been commenting for years, education for Hydrographic Surveying has been neglected in Australia and yet Australia relies on sea transportation. You may recall that the Chair of the Hydrography Commission had been working directly with Government consultants in assembling a Hydrographic Surveyor training package. Given that the Commission and Australasian Hydrographic Society have been attempting to have packages introduced by Universities and Recognised Training Organisations (RTOs) in Australia for well over 10 years, the new training package has been a relatively rapid resolution to the education shortfall. Updates on the progress may be found at Australian Industry Standards where you will see that the final endorsements of the National Water Training Package occurred on 02 January 2019. Please don’t get caught up in where the training sits, it’s a means to an end and a great win for the industry. The package modules are based upon the S5B syllabus but only deal with the hydrographic

Image credit: CSIRO

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components of the syllabus. Any general surveying techniques and principles already available within the diploma of surveying or a degree in surveying are not covered and are pre-requisite for issue of the full diploma. Therefore, if you hold either of these already, and successfully conduct the training modules, then you can receive the diploma in water industry operations – hydrographic survey. If you conduct the training package before a degree or diploma in surveying, you would receive a statement of attainment toward the diploma and would then need to complete either of those courses for issue of the diploma in water industry operations. The electives required to be undertaken in the diploma are identified as group c: specialist elective – hydrographic survey. Now, we need training organisations to pick up the packages and begin training. This is where your industry pressure can assist. Many training organisations shy away from the training as they don’t have the skilled staff, equipment or, don’t know how financially viable it would be. Well now it’s up to you all out there to help show them that it is a necessary training requirement. So, can you help the commission help you more? Yes you can. By volunteering to do some of the hard yards we can get these packages up and running by assisting the Universities and RTOs with those skilled individuals and with the equipment. Already several hydrographic survey companies are on board, but we also need individual volunteers to put together the sales pitch and promote the push. Is this you? If it is, drop the commission a hydrophone. Richard Cullen Chair – Hydrography Commission

SSSI sustaining partners

Land Surveying Commission report

n the recent Australia Day honours, Dr. Ray Holmes, Hon Fellow SSSI was awarded Member of Order of Australia. Ray commenced his career in 1945 at the Department of Crown Lands and Surveys and then transferred to the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission (SRWSC). At the SRWSC Ray gained his cadastral licence and worked on engineering and cadastral surveys associated with water supply, irrigation and dam development throughout northern Victoria. Ray held a number of senior management roles in SRWSC becoming Superintending Surveyor for North Central Victoria and was appointed Chief Surveyor in 1972. In 1979 Ray was appointed Surveyor General of Victoria and served in that position until his retirement in 1988. In 1994 he was awarded a Doctorate of Surveying Honaris Causa for his services to the surveying profession in Victoria by the University of Melbourne. During 1970 and 1971 Ray was seconded to the United Nations Food and

Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) on the Awash Valley Hydrological Project in Ethiopia and during his ‘retirement’, Ray continued working as a consultant to both the World Bank and the UNFAO as an expert adviser on land administration. Ray was an active participant in the Institution of Surveyors Australia for a number of years, serving and convening a number of sub committees and as president of the Victorian Division in 1975. Ray served from 1985-1986 as the 28th federal president of the Institution of Surveyors Australia, a forerunner body of SSSI. During his time as federal president, Ray drew attention to the need of the profession to develop its profile in international and overseas activities and warned against the risk of becoming elitist in attitude, with being primarily concerned with the narrowing field of cadastral surveying and ignoring some of the other related disciplines, which might perceive surveyors with cadastral surveying as being their sole area of expertise.. He stated that it is in all our interests to continue to foster and strengthen our relationship with related bodies Ray also raised the matter of our involvement in the international arena in particular the Southern Asia Pacific Region. A major step was ISA sponsoring

the first South East Asian Conference in Singapore in 1979 and it was Ray’s suggestion that it was timely to achieve the formation of a regional association under the auspices of an existing international body such as FIG. As part of our maturing roles and responsibilities in the international scene, Ray played an instrumental role in our successful bid for the XX FIG Congress held in Melbourne in 1994, the first time it was ever awarded to a country in the southern hemisphere. He was also the congress director for this highly successful event. In recent correspondence to the Victoria region Ray stated that I have always been proud to be a member and a strong advocate of an institute representing the full range of our profession. When one considers that later this year we are hosting the South East Asian Conference in Darwin and are taking a leadership role through Rob Sarib in the development of a FIG Asia Regional Capacity Network, it is as a result of the visionary groundwork of people such as Ray Holmes that today we can implement such initiatives with our regional neighbours The recognition bestowed on Dr. Ray Holmes as a Member to the Order of Australia is richly deserved.

Young Professionals Commission report SSSI National Young Professionals Mentoring Program 2019 - What Can It Do For You?

n 2018, the SSSI National Young Professionals launched the SSSI Mentoring Program with great success. Over 80 people came together across the nation, including students from 13 Universities as mentees and a wide and varied range of industry leaders as mentors. The 2018 mentoring program ran for four months, from July through to October, with mentor and mentee pairs meeting fortnightly to discuss career development and the transition from studying to working in the industry.

“The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.” – Steven Spielberg For many students who are close to finishing their degrees, whether they come from high school or from a background working in another industry, getting a foot in the door to start their spatial or surveying career can be a challenge. Knowing what to expect can be difficult, and navigating through the first year or two of being a professional in the industry can sometimes be confusing. Our industry is often very technical, and maintaining a clear focus on career goals and direction can sometimes fall to the wayside, especially for young professionals. Being involved in a mentoring program helps mentees meet and network with established

industry professionals and peers in similar positions, learn about the skills needed to succeed as a professional and the perspectives that will help with this, improve communication and interpersonal skills, and gain insights into what the real world is like in their line of work. “If I have seen further it is by s tanding on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton

For many established professionals (or ‘young-at-heart professionals’), capitalising on the chance to share some of their learnings and the wisdoms accumulated along their career path can be a very rewarding experience. Mentors can realise that they know much more than they thought they did, and many www.spatialsource.com.au 57

sssi find the opportunity to give back can be extremely rewarding and provide two-way learnings, as they pick up more about what’s new in the technologies used in the industry or cutting edge research being done in our field. Mentors gain many things from participating in a mentoring program, including leadership skills, the chance to reflect more acutely on their own journey and where it will lead in the future, and a chance to influence the people who will change the future. “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” – Winston Churchill

The 2019 SSSI National Young Professionals mentoring program will be run from July to October, and will open up to provide recent graduates an opportunity to be a mentee as well as students close to finishing their degrees. If you’d like to register your interest for the 2019 mentoring program, please fill in our Expression of Interest form here (https://goo.gl/forms/ Ed1UAtlVJt5bKwFD2) or by emailing your name and interest in the program to chair. yp@sssi.org.au, and we will get back to you shortly with a link to the application form and the full details of the program.

When was the last time you thought about Career Development? As we slog along through the months and years of our careers, how many of us stop to think about where we’re going, how we could make our work lives happier and more fulfilling, and what really works for us at work? In the geospatial and surveying industry, we can often get wrapped up in the need to technically advance ourselves and the softer side of things, career development, can be put into the ‘too hard’ basket. “You can’t just sit there and wait for people to give you that golden dream. You’ve got to get out there and make it happen for yourself.” – Diana Ross

In 2018, the SSSI Young Professionals launched a monthly webinar series to help us tackle just this. With one short hour a month, whether it is during the allocated webinar timeslot or at a later time with the recording of the webinar that’s sent to all registered attendees, you can be prompted to think more consciously about your career and how it’s going in easy to digest, bite-sized pieces on a range of topics.

58 position April/May 2019

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that our aim is too low and we reach it.” – Michaelangelo

We kicked off with our first webinar presented by Mark Hodgson. He gave a brilliant presentation about moving beyond being technically proficient, by building your reputation and influence. Mark gave some great pointers for building your confidence, and changing your mindset. He gave a background on why in today’s day and age, it’s not only what you know but who you know, and further explained that we all have a personal brand and influence people around us whether we know it or not, whether we think about it consciously or not. His excellent presentation gave a swathe of tips and tricks for thinking about who you want to notice you and what messages you want to send out to your networks. His insightful talk explained clearly and succinctly why thinking about how you have influence on the world around you can be vital to boosting your career. To find out more about Mark Hodgson and Influence, visit his website: http://markhodgson.com.au. “The key to successful leadership is influence, not authority.” – Kenneth H. Blanchard

Following closely on this theme was our second webinar by Julia Palmer, who gave some very valuable insights into the three stages to building profitable business relationships and how to make the most of a simple tool - conversation - to build a strategic and fruitful professional network. Julia improved our understanding of the three stages to building profitable business relationships. She explained how to have charismatic conversations, uncovered the difference between simple and strategic networks, and gave some great pointers on how to get make yourself visible and increase your influence. If you’d like to find out more, have a look at her website at www.juliapalmer.com. “Instead of better glasses, your network gives you better eyes.” – Ronald Burt

We have also heard from Dr. Karen Joyce and Professor Stuart Phinn, who have spoken with us about diversity and inclusion and how we can promote these within our organisations for the success of the industry at large. It was an interactive webinar and raised a lot of interested and important questions about the differences

between equality, equity and diversity, and how opportunities are available to different people in different ways. It gave a framework for thinking about what changes could be made and why they are important in workplaces, in personal lives and in society, and has prompted some conversations with your colleagues, family and friends about this important area for many of those who attended. If you’re interested in finding out more, please email chair.yp@sssi.org.au or get in contact with Stuart (s.phinn@uq.edu.au) or Karen (karen.joyce@jcu.edu.au) directly. “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Kim Seeling-Smith from Ignite Global has talked with us about about why many people spend more time planning their next vacation than their short- and medium-term career goals, and how to recognise and consciously utilise your strengths to help you work for your highest and best purpose effectively. Kim kicked off with the rather confronting realisation that most young professionals (and young-at-heart professionals) tend to put more time, effort and money into planning their vacations than their nearterm careers (3-5 years from present). She then walked through some tools on how to start thinking about what matters to you in your career, and how your career fits into the broader context of your life. She gave participants two free gifts to help them plan their career goals and work out what’s important to them in their jobs, and then dug deeper into the real heart of the webinar - strengths. Using the strengths profile to provide context, she explained how strengths are not only things that you are good at but which provide you with energy and which use often. “Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” – Pablo Picasso

To keep up to date with the latest SSSI Young Professionals Career Development webinars, or if you’d like to present at one of these webinars, please send an email to chair.yp@sssi.org.au. All of our webinars are listed on the SSSI events page, and are free for students. Roshni Sharma, Chair, SSSI National Young Professionals

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