Position 85 October-November 2016

October/November 2016 – No. 85

The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

OFF THE GRID But still in working Territory

Official publication of

inside Aerial accomplice Capturing more than expected

GIS to the rescue Finding missing persons spatially

Two lost ships Surveying HMAS Sydney 70 years on

contents

October/November 2016 No.85

28

page

16

page

page

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features 22 Cover story: Off the grid, but still in working Territory Field crews rejoice as spatially enabled automation allows work to go undisrupted.

30 Entering the ‘seventh dimension’ of BIM Achieving better accuracy and speed for on-site data acquisition.

34 Aboriginal answer For the past two years, Australian UAV has undertaken an annual drone survey of the Lake Victoria shoreline, a sensitive Australian heritage site.

16 Locating lost ships Making sense of HMAS Sydney and HSK Kormoran.

24 Getting it sorted With a budget of over two billion and a lifespan of five years, rebuilding the infrastructure in Christchurch was set to be the largest engineering project undertaken in New Zealand.

28 Leveraging location intelligence to find missing persons Authorities in NSW have more than a few spatial tricks up their sleeves when undertaking search and rescue.

Regulars 4 7 8 14 36 38

Upfront, calendar Editorial News Q&A with Professor Steve Hall New products SSSI

www.spatialsource.com.au 3

upfront

Upcoming Events 10-14 October 2016: Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress; Melbourne, VIC. www.itsworldcongress2016.com 11-13 October 2016: INTERGEO; Hamburg, Germany. www.intergeo.de/intergeo-en 13 October 2016: An afternoon with Jack; Sydney, NSW. esriaustralia.com.au/ events-an-afternoon-with-jack 14-15 October 2016: QLD Central Group Conference; Gladstone, QLD. bit.ly/1VWvrto 21 October 2016: WA Surveying and Spatial Sciences Conference; Perth, WA. bit.ly/2coBmEP 28-29 October 2016: QLD Northern Group Conference; Townsville, QLD. bit.ly/1VWvZiQ 31 October-3 November 2016: ACM SIGSPATIAL 2016; San Francisco, California. sigspatial2016.sigspatial.org

On the migration of species

W

ith the climate changing and seas rising, many questions are being raised about how this will affect wildlife and how human development will impact ecology.

Migration in Motion is an animated map showing some 2,954 species of birds (blue), mammals (pink), and amphibians (yellow) that will need to migrate in response to rising sea levels and climate change. In South America, shown here, many species are expected either to migrate up rivers such as the Amazon to cooler altitudes in the Andes, or south to cooler latitudes such as Patagonia.

The map plots the average direction that species will need to move to track hospitable climates as they shift across the landscape. Viewed online, the map not only shows the vectors of this movement, but animates the required migration of each species across continents.

It is based on research from University of Washington and The Nature Conservancy and modelled using climate change projections, the current estimated distributions, and the climatic needs of each species.

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1-3 November 2016: The Year in Infrastructure Conference; London, UK. www.bentley.com/YIIConference 3 November 2016: STEMx: Brisbane, QLD. www.stemx.events 7-9 November 2016: Trimble Dimensions; Las Vegas, Nevada. trimbledimensions.com

Using flow models from electronic circuit theory, the researchers then plotted movement routes for each species, connecting current habitats with their projected locations under climate change.

Nature Conservancy researcher Dan Majka used Mapbox to create the visualisation and OpenStreetMap for the base maps.

As this is based on coarse 50km data, the visualisation is unable to model local patterns, but is perhaps the first means to model changing ecosystems on a continental scale. While the map may not indicate the exact migrations that will take place, it does indicate general patterns and creates new data to inform decision making. Armed with this tool, environmental decisions can be made to ensure species can access habitable ecosystems and that human development does not impede this migration.

While presently this method has been applied only in North, South and Central America, it does have the potential to be rolled out internationally and inform land use practices and climate change mitigation the world over.

To view the map in motion, visit maps. tnc.org/migrations-in-motion. â–

14-17 November 2016: From Imagery to Map; Agra, India. conf.racurs.ru/conf2016/eng 16 November 2016: Home Delivery Asia Pacific; Melbourne, VIC. bit.ly/1VWtihe 18-20 November 2016: TeanGEO 2016; Tunis, Tunisia. www.teangeo.org/En/ 24-25 November 2016: NSW/ACT Regional Conference; Canberra, ACT. bit.ly/2coy2cw 28 November-1 December 2016: Pacific Islands GIS\RS User Conference; Suva, Fiji. gsd.spc.int/gisconference 28 November-2 December 2016: GSDI World Conference; Taipei, Taiwan. gsdi15.org.tw 6-8 December 2016: Commercial UAVs; Australia. www.commercialuavs.com.au 6-8 December 2016: IGNSS Conference: Sydney, NSW. www.ignss2016.unsw.edu.au 16-17 February 2017: European Intelligent Agriculture Congress; Brussels, Belgium. bit.ly/2coybwR

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The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

Publisher Simon Cooper Editor Anthony Wallace awallace@intermedia.com.au Graphic Designer Adrian Tipper Prepress Tony Willson National Advertising Manager Jon Tkach jon@intermedia.com.au Circulation/Subscriptions Chris Blacklock Production Jacqui Cooper 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: awallace@intermedia.com.au Advertising inquiries should be sent to: jon@intermedia.com.au Ph: +61 2 8586 6128 Designed and produced by The Intermedia Group, 41 Bridge Road, Glebe NSW 2037 Position is available via subscription only. To subscribe visit www.intermedia. com.au, phone 1 800 651 422 or email: subscriptions@intermedia.com.au.

Subscription rates and information can be found on page 50.

from the editor From needle in a haystack to precise science

I

n making the most of location information, spatial professionals are driving public benefits in an increasing number of ways. As a result, advancements in spatial and surveying technology keep rising to the surface of mainstream attention and shining light on an under-appreciated sector.

RPAS navigation technology will soon enable the first commercial drone delivery service when Domino’s pizzas are delivered in select areas of New Zealand. Technologies supporting reality capture, cartography and drone operations are liberating spatial technology for use by the non-spatial masses. And in the depths of the southern Indian Ocean, understanding the fate of the 239 passengers aboard MH370 may soon be realised, when search data is opened to the public and spatial modelling is undertaken to establish new search areas.

Similarly, the fate of Australia’s most significant naval tragedy is currently being solved using scanning and 3D modelling made for use by the public and researchers of everything from arts through to biology. The scanning of the recently discovered HMAS Sydney and its German counterpart are the focus of this Position’s lead story by the project’s lead researcher (page 16). The project has had very meaningful ramifications for the families of lost crewmembers and also sheds light on what may occur when a certain lost plane is discovered.

Indeed, when it comes to search and rescue, location is the most crucial factor.

Armed with a few clues, spatial analysis is allowing authorities to find missing persons faster. On page 28, the NSW police show how they turn a game of needle in a haystack into precise science.

Even deceased members of the most ancient traditions will benefit. As shown on page 34, Aboriginal culture is being preserved in Lake Victoria where ancient burial grounds are being studied with RPAS mapping. As a result, authorities can be confident in decision making when putting in measures to protect both the environment and the honour of the traditional owners.

Finally, in New Zealand the Christchurch rebuilding team has established a model for others around the world to follow when recovering from all types of disasters (see page 24).

The SCIRT team responsible for the rebuilding worked with multiple organisations and vendors to develop an automated workflow capable of handling over 700 individual projects.

I hope this issue of Position inspires you to also derive greater benefit for a wider society.

Anthony Wallace Editor awallace@intermedia.com.au

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.

October/November 2016 – No. 85

The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the publisher.

Supported by

Coming soon December 2016/January 2017 Innovations in positioning technology; Precision agriculture; Education.

February/March 2017 3D data acquisition; Emergency and disaster management; Datums & dynamics; Asia-Pacific focus

OFF THE GRID

On the cover

But still in working Territory

Official publication of

inside Aerial accomplice Capturing more than expected

GIS to the rescue Finding missing persons spatially

Two lost ships Surveying HMAS Sydney 70 years on

The Northern Territory’s 35,725km of roads served as the perfect launching pad for the new field working platform ‘konect’.

www.spatialsource.com.au 7

news Australia’s positioning media storm prevails Recent widespread reporting of Australia’s impending datum modernisation highlighted keen public interest in the change, as well as key misunderstandings of the technicalities.

Following an ABC News interview with Geoscience Australia’s Dan Jaska, the BBC suggested Australia’s coordinates were out by a kangaroo, and Reddit conjured links to the Olympics, global warming and Pokestops.

“The idea that Australia’s latitudes and longitudes

are ‘out by 1.5 metres’ is bound to grab attention,” said Michael Giudici, Surveyor General of Tasmania and a member of the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM), the body responsible for implementing the change.

“It sounds like a problem, and doesn’t seem to make sense in this modern age,” Mr Giudici said. “This is the key concept that we have to debunk to help stakeholders appreciate why we are

modernising the Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA94).”

He said it was encouraging to see broad recognition that many new technologies rely on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), and the growing interest in datums and reference systems.

“Australia’s plate-fixed GDA94 datum has, until now, met the needs of users of location information,” Mr Giudici said. “But within a few years, a vast range of consumer devices will

measure locations with accuracies of 10 centimetres, based on GNSS locations.”

The datum modernisation process will take place in two stages: starting from 2017, a new plate-fixed datum, GDA2020, will aim to align the datum with GNSS coordinates of 2020 - a shift in latitude and longitude of approximately 1.8 metres. Then, in 2020, a dynamic datum that allows for locations of points and their movement over time to be modelled will also be put in place.

The first female Surveyor General: Narelle Underwood Narelle Underwood has been appointed Surveyor General of New South Wales, a major role within the state government responsible for leadership in surveying, mapping and geographic information. The appointment makes Ms Underwood both the first woman to hold the role across all Australian states, and the youngest in the state in 200 years.

Ms Underwood will replace Des Mooney as Surveyor General and will commence her new role on 4 October 2016.

The appointment was announced by Department

of Finance, Services and Innovation Secretary Martin Hoffman, who said Ms Underwood brought a wealth of experience, most recently as the Acting Principal Surveyor at NSW Roads and Maritime Services.

“Ms Underwood is a leader in her profession working as an advisor to the Board of Surveying and Spatial Information and Chairwoman of the Surveying Mapping and Industry Council,” said Mr Hoffman.

Ms Underwood herself described the new appointment as both exciting

and challenging: “Being the first female Surveyor General will place my name in the history books alongside people who have made a significant impact on the development of NSW,” she said.

“I hope that my appointment to the role can be an example to young surveyors, in particular females, that there is a wide variety of career options available to them.

“I’m coming into the role at a time of great opportunity and change for the spatial and surveying sector.”

Leaders’ report confirms spatial industry is missing growth opportunities Insights from Australia’s spatial thought leaders have been compiled into the first report from the 2026 Spatial Industry Transformation and Growth Agenda. The initiative, known also as the 2026Agenda, is aimed at ensuring that Australia’s spatial industry is best positioned to evolve and make the most of key growth opportunities.

As part of this, the results of the 2026Agenda’s first stage of in-sector consultation with 40 Australian thought leaders across the spatial sector has been published in the Spatial Sector: Insights Report.

The report highlighted that 95% of respondents believed spatial technology organisations in Australia are either not achieving growth potential or that growth opportunities are being captured by other industry sectors.

The report also summarises the current barriers to growth and presents key thoughts about where transformation needs to focus over the next 10 years.

According to the respondents, the major key areas where this growth should occur include Single Data Infrastructure (SDI), National Positioning Infrastructure (NPI), Foundation Spatial

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Data Framework (FSDF), Application Programming Interface (API), and Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

The full consultation will consist of four phases: In-sector Consultation, Outside Sector Consultation, Leadership Forums, and National Consultation.

Results to question 7, ‘What should be the major technology changes?’

MH370 findings become open data as search turns elsewhere The search for missing flight MH370 in the so-called 7th Arc in the Southern Indian Ocean is nearing an end. While the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777200 and its 239 passengers are still yet to be found after two and a half years of searching, the findings of the search so far are to become freely available.

Australian Federal Transport and Infrastructure Minister Darren Chester announced that all sonar data on MH370 would be released by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB). The 120,000 square kilometres of sonar data will be accompanied by a “comprehensive report” when the current operation ends in late December.

Last month, the ATSB also revealed that investigators were planning a second phase of the search based on revised drift modelling using replica

flaperons in the southern Indian Ocean. They hoped that this modelling would provide evidence needed to continue the search beyond the current priority zone.

Earlier this year, drift simulations

by German oceanographers suggested that the crash site was different from that currently being searched.

The ATSB has since issued a call for tenders entitled “Provision of a Drift Modelling and Search and Rescue System”.

In the tender, flight MH370 is not mentioned, however, it calls for support in prosecuting and managing search

and rescue incidents with drift modelling for partner countries Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Mauritius - areas towards which German modelling pointed.

Map of the path taken by Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, with a focus on Flight Information Regions (the responsible air traffic control authority). Air routes and possible diversion airfields (runway over 5000ft) are also depicted. Image courtesy of Andrew Heneen/ WikiPedia.

Committed to Delivering Imagery

“We needed some fresh 50cm imagery for an agricultural project in the notoriously cloudy Northland of NZ. On Tuesday the feasibility study from the GeoStore interface advised Challenging; well we knew that, and so we were elated by the email on Friday that our cloud free image had been acquired and then 2 hours later to able to analyse the image.”

David Napier, SKYVUW Ltd

intelligence-airbusds.com

www.spatialsource.com.au 9

news Geo-enabling the nation’s capital SSSI NSW and SSSI ACT have announced the NSW/ ACT Regional Conference 2016 will be held on Thursday 24th November to Friday 25th November 2016 at the Mercure Hotel in Canberra.

In 2015, over 100 surveyors and spatial scientists met for the annual SSSI NSW Regional Conference in the Hunter Valley.

With the combined conference in the nation’s capital, the NSW/ ACT Regional Conference 2016 is set to be even bigger.

The theme of this year’s conference will be ‘GeoEnabling our Community – taking Surveying and Spatial to the People’.

Geo-Enablement refers to utilising spatial data to enable business and development

processes within society, embedding and leveraging the power of location and geography within workflows and business processes, as well as the act of enriching non-spatial information with geographic context.

New Zealand sets the stage for the first drone pizza delivery

Flirtey CEO Matt Sweeny, Domino’s Pizza CEO Don Meij and New Zealand Minister of Transport Simon Bridges with the DRU drone.

Flirtey and Domino’s.

Domino’s Pizza Enterprises joined forces with UAV industry innovator Flirtey to launch what they regard is the first

Relaxed New Zealand aviation rules that free up the use of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) have led to the announcement of the first pizza delivery by

commercial drone delivery service in the world. It is expected that the trial of store-to-door drone deliveries from selected Domino’s New Zealand stores will begin later in the year. To demonstrate the technology in Auckland, the Domino’s Robotic Unit (DRR) drone conducted an autonomous flight to deliver a hot Domino’s pizza.

With headquarters in Brisbane, Domino’s were expected to first launch the technology in Australia.

However, differences in regulations seem to have prompted the team to instead begin operations across the Tasman.

New Zealand’s Transport Minister Simon Bridges

welcomed the news, saying that Domino’s and Flirtey selected New Zealand to begin trials because of its regulations that support innovation.

“Our forward-thinking aviation regulations encourage innovation, while protecting safety,” said Mr Bridges. “Our enabling laws and regulations mean that we have the ideal environment to trial all forms of technology.”

Delivery technology will be the focus of a new conference looking at technology to support lastmile logistics. Home Delivery Asia Pacific will take place in Melbourne on 16 November at the Automotive Centre of Excellence and will address the shift to on-demand retail services.

Propeller takes off with both hardware and software Sydney start-up Propeller Aerobatics has swiftly moved into the commercial RPAS space with a partnership with major drone manufacturer DJI, the roll out of its cloud processing, and the announcement of its AeroPoints ground control positioning (GCP) system.

The work of the small Australian team of 16 caught the attention of Chinese company DJI, undoubtedly the biggest player in the drone industry, who then partnered to deliver a combined solution taking advantage of Propeller’s hardware and software alongside DJI’s professionalgrade drones.

Strategic partnerships lead at DJI Jan Gasparic recognised

the talent of the young Propeller team right away.

“When we started speaking to Propeller Aero, we were immediately struck by how quickly they were developing their platform and tailoring it for the Australian market,” Mr Gasparic said. “Their AeroPoints automated GCP system is also a unique approach to improving the operations of UAV operators.

“It is exciting to see a fresh perspective on the market.”

In addition to the Propeller Aero software, the AeroPoints GCP system allows users to coordinate aerial surveys more easily and tie-in operations to a datum with portable, solar-powered, selfpositioning sensors.

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The AeroPoints ground control positioning (GCP) system.

“When results matter the choice is clear.”

Jeff Robinson Executive Manager, Professional Services

Esri Australia – Professional Services.

117 ArcGIS professionals 31 Esri accredited trainers 26 support staff 9 high-level security cleared ArcGIS specialists 37 years’ experience.

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news SIBA appoints Alistair Byrom as chairman incoming Chairman of the SIBA Board. His term as Chairman will commence at the conclusion of SIBA’s Annual General Meeting in November 2016.

Byrom is currently SIBA Board’s Vice Chairman

The Spatial Industries Business Association (SIBA) has announced that Alistair Byrom has been appointed

and served as Chairman of SIBA Queensland between 2009 and 2014. Alistair is a recipient of the 2010 SSSI Spatial Professional of the Year award and was recently made a SSSI Fellow. In 2015, Alistair received the

SIBA Queensland Chair’s Award for his service to the industry.

Byrom is a registered cadastral surveyor and a principal of Brisbane headquartered firm Goodwin Midson.

Spatial Source releases free Australasian tender service Spatial Source’s tender service has for over six years provided premium subscribers in the surveying and spatial sector with the easiest method to find government contracts across Australia, New Zealand, South East Asia and the Pacific Islands.

In order to add value for all Spatial Source readers, the tender service is now available to all newsletter subscribers.

Over the 2015-2016 financial period, over 500

tenders were compiled and summarised to ensure readers did not miss key contracts. These included tenders as diverse as cadastral surveys and virtual reality mapping, with all of them having a spatial or surveying dimension.

Those wanting to access the free tender service need to make sure they are subscribed to the Spatial Source newsletter to receive the link each week to the list of new tenders.

Tech causes majority of RPAS accidents, not humans Communication issues, not human error have been found to be the most common cause of RPAS incidents.

Researchers from Australia have analysed drone incidents and accidents the world over to determine the underlying cause of RPAS operations gone wrong. Surprisingly, the study showed technical problems were the cause of 64 per cent of the incidents, not operator error.

Researchers Dr Graham Wild and Dr Glenn Baxter from RMIT University’s School of Engineering, along with John Murray from Edith Cowan University, completed the first examination of more than 150 reported civil incidents occurring between 2006 and 2016 involving drones, or Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS).

Specifically, it was found that RPAS operations are

more likely to experience loss of control in flight, events during take-off and in cruise, as well as equipment problems.

The study found that in most cases, broken communications links between the pilot and the RPAS were the cause of the incident.

“Large transport category aircraft, such as those from a Boeing or Airbus,

are required to have triple redundant systems for their communications,” researcher Dr Graham Wild said. “But drones don’t and some of the improvements that have reduced the risks in those aircraft could also be used to improve the safety of drones.”

To overcome the issue, Dr Wild said more robust communications systems, even on cheaper RPAS, could help prevent accidents.

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 October/November 2016

10TH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM FOR

Digital Earth & Locate17 03-06 April 2017 International Convention Centre Sydney

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION - OUR FUTURE www.digitalearthsymposium.com

q&a

Q&A with Lyn Terrett A frequently heard name, Lyn Terrett is both a pioneer and a valuable mentor. As a business owner and advocate of Destination Spatial, there are few people more passionate about the future of the spatial industry. She shared with Position her personal story and the increasingly important role of the ‘digital champion’.

ANTHONY WALLACE

What are some of your greatest achievements in the spatial industry to date?

I’m a founding director of both RapidMap and Iconyx, so I’ve been in the industry for almost a quarter of a century. I grew up as an Australian farm girl and the landscape has always been important to me. I studied sciences to start with and then went onto study electronics and computers, and also happened to marry a surveyor who was dealing with GPS when it was a new technology. My electronics background enabled me to create differential GPS base stations to achieve better accuracy. My husband Peter had worked for the government for over 17 years and loved his work as a surveyor.

When the government in Victoria began to downsize, we decided we would go into business together.

That’s when he started to describe GPS to me and we decided that’s where we would start. We made the first fire mapping software in the world using GIS, which later became a national standard. We also wrote our own software for mapping and managing asset data capture, hence the RapidMap name. When Victoria began amalgamating councils from about 280 to 78 local government councils, they didn’t know what they owned, where it was and what condition it was in, so they couldn’t frame any contracts. RapidMap was then very busy — and still is today — mapping these assets.

With the emergency services, we have been involved in the Canberra fires, forensic mapping for gas plant explosions, and the Port Arthur massacre – changing the way people did things in terms of mapping and collecting evidence. In response to September 11, the National

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Geographic Society (part of homeland security, critical infrastructure and counter-terrorism) seconded half of my team and myself into the map division, and we wrote software that was rolled out across the United States.

How did you become involved in inspiring the next generation of professionals with Destination Spatial?

When I joined SIBA I realised that a lot of the surveying, cartography and geography courses were closing down. I put my hand up and said: “Who are we going to employ, if we don’t have people enrolling in these courses? If the courses don’t exist, we have no future employees.” They said: “Great, you’ve got a job.”

I headed up a committee on education in SIBA and looked around to find out who was doing a great job. So I went to Queensland and met with Destination Spatial, who had, between SIBA and SSSI, set up a committee, branding and website. They had all these resources that I borrowed and I have been driving that for over six years as part of the Destination Spatial strategy.

The good news out of that is that we’ve turned it around: we haven’t lost any more courses - we’re growing courses and enrolments. Now I’m working with mentoring the young professionals and graduates to make sure they get their dream jobs, helping them get industry experience, showing them how to present themselves, and encouraging them to stay focused.

What has Destination Spatial done to turn it around and what initiatives have you found to be most effective?

Face-to-face conferences and going to schools are extremely effective. Engaging parents, teachers and careers advisers are also very effective. One thing we learnt that is very powerful is having a multiorganisational committee: not just being SIBA and SSSI, but welcoming other organisations like the Geography Teachers Association, CRCSI, GHD and Jacobs.

We’ve also been driving awareness within our industry, so that everybody knows how to talk about the industry and refer potential students to Destination Spatial. The important thing is to have a common brand that can be remembered and easily found on the web, so that anyone, whether a surveyor or parent, can refer people to destinationspatial.org.

Have you encountered young people who have too many limiting factors to enter a spatial career?

How did you overcome it?

Yes, I’m actually having those discussions now. I went to the Spatial Information Day in South Australia last year, and in the young professional session they were all complaining about the downturn in mining and difficulties in finding a job. I said, “Why are we all here commiserating?

Your potential employers are downstairs in the exhibition hall.” So I went and introduced them, booth by booth, and got the vendors to tell them about how they got their job in the spatial industry,

“Gen Y gets a bad rap and it’s unfair actually, because they have technology running through their veins and are one of the best opportunities we have.”

what they love about it, and how other people can get jobs in the organisation.

To my knowledge, everybody has been employed since then. At this year’s Spatial Information Day, we did it again and actually had a recruitment specialist talk about how to present themselves, how to use LinkedIn, and I spoke to them about how to insert themselves into an organisation as a ‘digital champion’.

What is a digital champion, and how can a young person ensure they assume that role in an organisation?

A digital champion is someone who can communicate with the various stakeholders within an organisation about technology. One thing I have found is that there is an upper level of management in an organisation that might understand the business, but not the technology. So a digital champion is someone who has the ability to transact communication between business owners, IT, employees, users and vendors, so that when a system is put in, it is actually a very big win for an organisation.

I’ve been spending a lot of time understanding and working through the issues of generational transformation.

Gen Y gets a bad rap and it’s unfair actually, because they have technology running through their veins and are one of the best opportunities we have.

If your organisation’s board or senior management is full of baby boomers, they don’t feel overly confident or comfortable in making a digital transformation.

That’s why it’s important to have digital champions who will help communicate the advantages and realise benefits really quickly. The younger generation is in a better position to do this, but we just have to trust them. I’m trying to help the older generation to realise that they’ve got absolute gold in their lower ranks and that they should be doing all they can to encourage and include them.

How do you see the role of spatial professionals in the world’s impending challenges?

I like to put it this way: the spatial industry is like the health industry.

Surveyors are like the doctors, but there are many other practitioners within the health industry. There are also many practitioners within the spatial industry and we all have to work together for the health of the planet (rather than the health of the patient). ■

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feature All 645 of the crew of HMAS Sydney were lost.

Locating lost ships: making sense of HMAS Sydney and HSK Kormoran On 19 November 1941, the pride of the Australian Navy, HMAS Sydney II, a state-of-the-art cruiser that had already won several battles, disappeared in home waters off the Western Australian coast. When a search for the famous ship was commenced, hundreds of sailors were rescued from small boats - but they were all German Navy crewmen. These enemy sailors told an improbable story of how their disguised and heavily armed converted merchant ship HSK Kormoran had taken Sydney by surprise, and that the two ships had mortally wounded each other in a close-range fight.

They claimed they had last seen Sydney on fire and headed south before they abandoned their own crippled vessel. For many people, the fact that hundreds of Germans had survived while no Australians seemed very suspicious.

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O

nly two weeks later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, and the world was plunged even deeper into the largest war to have ever occurred. In the chaos and aftermath of a global war, no formal investigation was ever held, even though this was the worst loss of life in the history of the Australian Navy. In the absence of physical evidence or formal conclusion, the events of that day moved into the realm of folklore and tabloid sensationalism for almost seventy years, with claims of war crimes and government cover-ups that made the lack of resolution for thousands of family members a lifelong burden. The loss of HMAS Sydney with all 645 of her crew stands as a marker for when the Second World War came to affect Australia very directly.

In 2008, after a years-long struggle to raise enough funds, the wrecks of both Sydney and Kormoran were found by the not-for-profit Finding Sydney Foundation, which employed renowned shipwreck finder David Mearns to plan and execute the search. In a process very similar to the recent search for MH370, the wrecks were located using deep-tow side-scan sonar, and then inspected with both still image and video cameras mounted on an ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle). The wrecks are 2,500 metres deep, lying 20km apart on an essentially flat seabed. At these depths there is no light, very little current, and few species of marine life.

The results of the 2008 expedition were approximately 1,500 still images and hours of video footage that revealed the horrifying damage that both ships suffered.

It was also clear that the German account was true, confirming that the battle that had occurred was one of the most unusual in the history of naval warfare. The success of the 2008 mission in locating and photographing both wrecks brought resolution to the whole community of families and experts involved in the Sydney and Kormoran story.

In 2011, Dr Andrew Hutchison of Curtin University’s School of Art and Design decided to see if the archive of visual material from 2008 could be used to tell this story to a wider, younger audience that had little or no familiarity of the Second World War. “People don’t appreciate how critical the Second World War was, in terms of human cost, and also how it has directly shaped the way we live our lives,” said Dr Hutchison. “When I was growing up in the 1970s, war veterans were everywhere. They were the plumber, the bank manager, even your own father. But of course, it is very different now. The war stimulated huge innovations such as antibiotics, radar, jet aircraft, computers, and digital technology.”

The plan was to use the existing material to create a 3D environment that allowed people to explore and discover

Multibeam sonar scan of HMAS Sydney main wreck.

the technology of the times, and the men who lived and lost their lives using it.

The technique of using many images to produce realistic 3D models is variously known as close-range photogrammetry, photogrammetric 3D reconstruction, reality-based modelling, or more simply, ‘photographic reconstruction’.

“Photo reconstruction has been around for a while, but its time has now come,” continued Dr Hutchison. “Digital cameras, faster processing power in computers, and people’s willingness to interact with virtual, spatial environments has made this possible. So I wanted to use interactive media to tell this story, as this provides a now natural means to engage an audience.”

Andrew Hutchison has previous experience using photographic reconstruction in land-based archaeology, architecture, town planning and rock art, but none of these had the problems of being underwater, at such depths. When the 2008 archive was examined in detail, it became clear that the number of images available were insufficient for the creation of a 3D environment of the ships. While the camera and lighting equipment used in 2008 was state-of-the-art for subsea applications at the time, it was simply not intended to be used for photographic reconstruction.

Taking new tech underwater In 2011, the interdisciplinary team at Curtin University started to explore a possible return to the wreck sites with the subsea research community. It turned out there was plenty of appetite, based on a whole range of improved technologies that had come into the market since the 2008 discovery of the wrecks.

Vessels had greater capacity to operate in adverse weather, ROV had greater power, cameras were higher resolution, and lights more powerful. DOF Subsea, a supplier of subsea services to the international oil and gas industry, made the extraordinary offer to take the team back to the wreck sites at no cost, services that would have cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars per day at commercial rates.

With a return to the sites now possible, the Western Australian Museum joined the project. A sizeable grant from the Commonwealth Government Department of Heritage ensured there was funding to create the array of lights and cameras that would take hundreds of thousands of still images, and many hours of HD stereo video.

Each of the ships is the size of a large building, and they have been smashed and ripped apart and the parts scattered around the sea floor to create a debris field hundreds of meters wide. Thousands of objects that fell off the decks, or out of the broken ships, lay around everywhere. The scope of the job is not just of two ships, but more like multiple architectural sized objects in a landscape covered in very fine detail of huge interest and importance.

Because of this, the team had to be able to record all of this in great detail.

A special IT system was designed to allow all of this material to be recorded from the seabed to the vessel - a total of 50 Terabytes of data. A team with very diverse skills in cultural heritage, engineering, surveying, logistics, manufacturing, photography and marine sciences was assembled to deal with the

task at hand. DOF Subsea provided not only the vessel, but planning, training and engineering support for the project in the two-year lead-up, and provided the specialist ROV pilots who had to actually navigate the ROV through the tasks safely, in what turned out to be adverse weather conditions that tested the capacity of even the latest generation vessels.

In four days of operation in early May 2015, approximately 500,000 still images and 300 hours of video material were gathered from the wrecks of both Sydney and Kormoran, as well as the extensive debris fields surrounding them.

In addition, a multi-beam sonar scan was made of the main wreck sites, and part of each debris field. Samples of water, soil and marine growth were also taken from the wreck sites to contribute to the management plan that the Western Australian Museum will develop to monitor and protect the sites.

The primary objective of the mission, however, was to use the wealth of material gathered to uncover the truth about the fate of the two ships, and Andrew Hutchison was determined to humanise the story. As part of the preparations for 

“We quickly realised that telling this story was going to be all about locating it in space.”

Marine rusticles are quickly covering many parts of the ship. 2008 on the left, 2015 on the right.

www.spatialsource.com.au 17

feature DOF Subsea’s brand new subsea operations vessel.

Photos of Sydney’s B-turret with clear evidence of two direct hits confirmed the German account of the accuracy of their gunfire.

the mission, he interviewed two men, both in their nineties, who had long service on HMAS Sydney and who were transferred off Sydney just before she sailed from Fremantle, never to return.

“I was really struck by how they both talked about the ship as a community, a small town, in which they had lived in the closest of quarters with 600 other guys,” said Dr Hutchison of the two veterans Jim Lavender and Tom Fisher. “Both Jim and Tom were a wealth of information about exactly what parts of the ship did what.

“Their personal stories strongly informed our task planning about which parts of the ship we would focus on.”

Two shoes lay on the seafloor at 2,500 metres in the Sydney debris field.

Jim Lavender lived aboard Sydney for years, and described Sydney as a ‘village’. He died only two weeks after the 2015 mission returned

18 position October/November 2016

Both of the veterans, Jim Lavender and Tom Fisher, have since passed away.

recognisable,” said Hutchison. “But that may not be the case in another 20 years.”

Walking in their shoes

Getting a fix

Distributed throughout the debris field, mixed up with shredded steel and cables, torpedoes and gun shells, are dozens, possibly hundreds of shoes. While the natural forces of the ocean have long ago consumed any human remains and clothing, shoes have survived. It is thought that the tanned leather is poisonous to the marine life that can consumes even untreated wood.

“Shoes are so personal, so we are very interested in them as a way to really convey to an audience just how human this tragedy has been. They really show the human presence that was once there.”

An objective of the project will be to merge the 2008 image set with the 2015 image set to create an integrated superset that becomes a single, interactive site map that shows as much as is known of the wreck sites. This can then be used by marine scientists, archaeologists, and also for presentation to a wider audience.

The problem of accurately establishing scale across the two datasets and different camera types will be accomplished using the wreckage in the debris field itself.

Sydney had anti-aircraft guns that used mass-produced brass shell casings, many of which are scattered throughout the debris field. Brass is completely resistant to corrosion in seawater, so they provide a very convenient scale bar of known size at many points. Fortunately, the project has access to a brass shell casing of that exact type, in the collection of researcher Wes Olson.

The visual data is already being used to undertake comparisons to the 2008 imagery, to see how the wrecks have changed in only seven years. The rate of growth of marine life was much faster than many of the team expected.

“I am glad we went back when we did, as the ships are currently still

The problems of fixing location underwater were significant. Very accurate underwater positions on a site can be achieved using Long Base Line system, but this involves the fixing of multiple beacons to the sea floor, a timeconsuming process in itself. With very limited sea time, LBL was not an option open to the expedition. The alternative was to use ship-based acoustic systems to listen to beacons on the ROV themselves, but this becomes very complex, especially under 2,500 metres of water.

Inaccuracies can occur due to variations in water depth, temperature and salinity, as well as the motion of the vessel on the surface. Nevertheless, useful position data was achieved for each of the ROV, and one of the ROV was equipped with a multi-beam sonar. This has already revealed more detail of the impact craters formed when the ships collided with the seafloor, revealing the angles of descent and great speed they were travelling at, adding to the story of what happened.

It is possible that future technologies such as underwater laser scanning may be able to resurvey the wreck sites at much less cost, and record in much higher resolution. The work already done in 2008 and 2015 will provide baselines for the changes that are ongoing in the wreck sites.

“The technology we got to use is amazing, but what really made all that technology come together in one place, at one time, was the huge investment by corporations, specialist suppliers, government agencies, and individuals who donated their time for huge discounts, or even for free, and still treated it as the most urgent priority they had,” said Hutchison. “It is a very powerful story that everyone wanted to see brought to light.” ■

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Program 9.00am Merchant Independence - Controlling Last Mile Ben Nowlan, Co-founder and CEO, Sherpa Merchant independence is the ability to compete in a world where technology giants are taking over the supply chain and controlling the customers’ purse strings. As companies like Amazon, Alibaba and Deliveroo eat up market share, it’s ever more critical that business take back control through a better last mile experience. Via improvements in driver and delivery technology, we can power a retailer’s own delivery and provide a more customer centric delivery experience through delivery management, capacity management, supplier aggregation and inventory sharing.

9.45am Tackling Last Mile Delivery Brent Stafford, Director, APAC Enterprise Sales, HERE

16 NOVEMBER

2016

Automotive Centre of Excellence, Melbourne 1 Batmans Hill Dr, Docklands VIC 3008

Fueled by technology and innovative business models, the on demand economy is creating new ways of matching supply with demand, while maximizing distribution and on the ground delivery efficiency. Central to this is harnessing the power of location information to ensure timely goods pickup and delivery, whether by truck, car, bicycle, or a combination thereof. As a leading global provider of location services and the partner of choice for many of the industry’s leading on demand companies, HERE is uniquely placed to share its experience in best practice last mile delivery.

10.30am MORNING TEA 11.00am Home Delivery Scheduling – Beyond Optimisation Grant Nielsen, Regional General Manager, Smartrans The benefits of scheduling and route optimisation systems in ‘last mile’ delivery environments are widely recognised and increasingly pervasive.

This talk will not elaborate on the traditional reasons for implementing such systems, but will instead focus on three key areas where such systems can be applied to particularly benefit the home delivery market.

Using example cases ranging from startup to one of the largest home delivery names in the market, this talk will analyse how leveraging such systems can advance and grow the industry by: • Growing loyalty and growth by enabling unprecedented customer convenience • Helping new entrants into the home delivery market design a sustainable distribution model • Enabling custom workflows to enable the specific GTM strategy.

11.45am Last Mile Capacity Visibility for Consumers Katie Kinraid, Head of Strategy, Blackbay

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As someone that prides themselves on keeping ahead of the market and looking for innovative new services, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to just keep track of the competition in the last mile delivery space. eBay Now, Postmates, Deliv, Amazon Fresh, WunWun, We Deliver, UberCornerStore, UberCargo,Convoy, Walgreens, MyWays, InstaCart, ShipDroid. It seems that everyone is ticking the boxes to offer collection points and same day ‘instadelivery’ via the cloud. However what is universal is the ever present failed or carded delivery.

This presentation utilizes research conducted by Blackbay across the globe along with key learnings from supporting some of the largest postal and courier organisations in the world ask the questions on what is stopping the industry from solving the basic delivery dilemma and failing to provide true transparency and capacity to consumers. Why is it that in other online markets like grocery shopping or flight bookings we see far more transparency on the capacity to deliver to consumer expectation?

12.30pm LUNCH 1.15pm What’s the Connection between Software and Market Advantage?

Joost Bekker, Business Development Director, PTV Group On-line shopping has changed the world of parcel delivery Although UK trends suggest that B2B volumes have been falling over

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the past years, we see a sharp increase in the B2C volumes of parcel deliveries. The increase in B2C is largely driven by growth in online shopping and is expected to keep growing with increasing choice, convenience and competitive offerings.

With the increase of B2C the industry is facing a new set of challenges: • High level of delivery failure due to not at home in combination with no permission to leave and/or signature required • Congestion to/from residential areas • Inefficient delivery volumes (B2C generally involves delivering one package per stop compared to larger volumes in B2B). • Changes in delivery density, routes that previously concentrated on commercial areas have to be expanded to other places like residential neighbourhoods.

Using a range of customer examples, we’ll explain how software solutions can deliver market advantage: • save planning time • save fuel / emissions • Improve fleet utilisation • Increase customer service • Calculate reliable ETA • Meet your promises • Act faster and more precise • React to last minute changes.

With scheduling & optimisation solutions you can solve your home delivery challenges.

2.00pm BC Sands’ Last Mile Delivery Solution – What, Why, How (The Journey for the BC Sands’ Team) and the Benefits for Customers Mark Parsons, Founder and Managing Director, BC Sands Pty Ltd BC Sands Building & Landscape Supplies has been supplying landscaping and building supplies for over thirty years in Sydney. With yards in Mascot and Taren Point and over 30 trucks, BC Sands provides a large product range including sand, cement, bricks, hardware, landscaping products etc.

BC Sands’ aim is to be Sydney’s premium quality building & landscape supplier and to always bring customers the best – on time and in full.

To support BC Sands’ current and future growth objectives, Mark recognised that technology was required, and implemented Descartes Route Planner to: • Obtain higher levels of customer service through the ability to commit to delivery time windows and deliver as promised; • Improve the efficiency of the fleet; • Improve visibility of deliveries in progress and customer orders from point of order through to point of delivery, with proof of delivery; and • Enable compliance with regulations, including chain of responsibility. With Route Planner now implemented at BC Sands, Mark will describe the journey so far.

2.45pm Meeting and Exceeding Customer Expectations for Home Delivery in the On-Demand World Andrew Walker, Founder and CEO of Fleet Engineering According to Australian Food News the delivery market for food alone in Australia and New Zealand is worth $3billion(AUS) and growing.

The entire on-demand world is expanding rapidly and global giants like Dominos are setting the benchmark for customer experience and expectations with their live delivery tracking.

In this presentation, Andrew explores the ways in which technology has changed the customer experience and the challenges facing retailers and delivery service providers of all sizes in meeting and exceeding their customers’ expectations.

As well as challenges though, new technologies have brought exciting opportunities for retailers and delivery service providers of all size, many of which will be presented, with specific reference to the following key elements of the customer experience: 1. Instant pricing online 2. On-demand ordering 3. Convenient delivery options 4. Live delivery-status updates and ETA’s 5. Real-time tracking on a map for customers 6. Providing feedback 7. Customer loyalty.

3.15pm AFTERNOON TEA 3.45pm what3words - Addressing for the Last 50 Meters Maurits van der Vlugt, Authorised what3words Solutions Consultant, Mercury Project Solutions, What3words Only 11% of Australia’s landmass can be referenced through street addressing. However, classic addressing doesn’t always help when receiving a delivery in a unit block, the loading dock in a business park, a festival campground, or when directing the drone to your back yard, but not into the pool. Until recently, if we wanted to reference more precise locations, we had to revert to using coordinates. But humans don’t remember or communicate strings of up to 16 digits particularly well.

And getting it wrong can be expensive, or even worse. This presentation looks at the pros and cons of innovative addressing solutions, and how they can and will save money and lives, and how they deliver significant economic and social benefits, contributing to our prosperity.

4.15pm Deliveroo Closing address.

LEVI ARON, Deliveroo Levi Aron has 17 years’ experience in senior leadership roles including operations, sales, marketing, and customer engagement. Levi has successfully demonstrated a track record of building and scaling businesses to desired goals and objectives. Currently Levi is the Australian country manager for Deliveroo, a London-based tech start-up that provides premium food delivery from restaurants to homes or offices. Deliveroo is now available in 12 countries, 100 cities and has raised A$623 million to date.

BEN NOWLAN, Sherpa Ben is an energetic, driven and experienced entrepreneur establishing a series of successful businesses over the last 10 years. Ben is now the co-founder and CEO of Sherpa, a technology driven delivery solution for businesses. Ben spends time and is passionate about advising startups on strategy, growth and investment as well as working with the private sector on innovation and growth culture initiatives.

BRENT STAFFORD, HERE As Director of Sales for Asia Pacific, Brent leads the business development of location content and solutions across automotive, consumer and enterprise segments in the region. A former Victorian Policemen of 10 years’ service, Brent then worked at Robert Bosch and Pacific Access prior to becoming Executive Director of Intelligent Transport Systems Australia where he managed the implementation of the national strategy for ITS in Australia for the Australian Transport Council of Ministers via Austroads.

MAURITS VAN DER VLUGT, Mercury Project Solutions Maurits is recognised as one of Australia’s leading authorities in the design and implementation of (interoperable) spatial data infrastructures, and web delivery of spatial data. Maurits has a long career in consulting government and the private sector on developing location-intelligence strategies, along with the enabling technology frameworks, business cases and implementation planning.

Having worked for over 20 years in the spatial information industry in Europe, the USA and Australia, he has developed an extensive international network.

GRANT NIELSEN, Smartrans Grant Nielsen is a specialist in the creation and application of technology to bring about business transformation. His origins are as an Electrical Engineer who has been building IT solutions for almost 20 years. He began his working career building and maintaining IT solutions for investment banking institutions in London before joining an innovative start-up organisation that led the innovation curve in the early 2000’s in the web collaboration space.

JOOST BEKKER, PTV Group The native Dutchman gained international experience both working in operations as well as in consulting. For twelve years he operated as A to B Consultancy, a logistics consultancy based in the Netherlands, and gained an in-depth understanding of how operations can benefit from software solutions and how to make that work. Now based in Sydney, he is in charge of business development for PTV Group’s logistic solutions in the Asia Pacific Region.

KATIE KINRAID, Blackbay Katie is Head of Strategy for global last mile solutions provider, Blackbay; with responsibilities for market awareness, propositions definition, realisation and industry evangelism. Katie has over 11 years experience in last mile delivery across EMEA, North American and APAC with a passion for ensuring the end consumer is receiving the most transparent, reliable and convenient service possible.

ANDREW WALKER, Fleet Engineering Andrew Walker’s career as an international business consultant has saved multinationals millions through improved information systems, management practices and innovative business processes.

MARK PARSONS, BC Sands Mark is committed to growing and nurturing BC Sands into Sydney’s leading Building & Landscape Supply Company.

cover story

Off the grid but still in working Territory

The Northern Territory, in context. Source: Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE OrbView-2

Field crews rejoice as spatially enabled automation allows work to go undisrupted.

ANTHONY WALLACE

T

o be a field worker in the Northern Territory is to daily perform astonishing geographical feats. Following the 1,500km Stuart highway along the length of the Territory from Darwin to Alice Springs, you will ideally want to take at least three days and even then, you will encounter only a handful of towns, road stations and tourist sites – every one of which you will need to stop at either to refuel or take in the sights.

Territorian road inspectors therefore have quite a task when it comes to ensuring that roads are kept in working condition across 35,725km of roads, only 25 per cent of which are sealed.

In addition to the sheer enormity of the landscape they work in, inspectors must also contend with wet season floods, extreme heat, bushfires and even the odd man-eating crocodile.

On top of all this, telecommunications are limited to populated areas, while the bulk of the road network is not within network coverage. The Territory therefore stands out as an ideal launching pad for a technology that enables field workers to stay off the grid, but also on the job.

A new ‘konect’-ion The Northern Territory Government had been using konect software in its infrastructure environment when in 2015, realising that spatial data was key to a better workflow, it decided to establish a road field operations project to roll out improved technology for the process. Global GBM provides the mobile mapping and GIS functionality to deliver the technology improvements that the government needed.

22 position October/November 2016

Together, Global GBM and the NT Government jointly delivered a successful fast-track project with Global GBM’s new ‘konect’ field work package as part of an early adopter program. Armed with a konect-enabled tablet, phone or computer, a road inspector is now able harness the power of smart forms, interactive maps, GPS tracking, data collection and spatial analysis. With it came not only the ability to continue work in the field, but also a boost to productivity, economy and safety.

Field teams rejoice Traditionally, a road inspector in the Territory would need to travel each road segment and log the location of defects, relative to chainages along the road. They would then return to the office with a list of defects that a supervisor would log as work for field crews, who would then search for the defect, perform any work required, and report back to the office in person.

With so much back and forth, this workflow consumed a large number of man hours, was prone to errors, and in a place like the Northern Territory, could often expose field workers to any number of hazards.

To assist workers in locating an area of interest, konect has inbuilt GPS and mobile maps. Without these navigational aids, crews tend to waste time locating and re-locating work sites.

Photographs and maps from previous konect-empowered field workers also clear any uncertainty around work assignments.

When it is time to start work on a Territory road, it is more than likely to be out of range of any telecommunications connection, mobile or not. To overcome this, any data collected, maps edited or photographs taken using konect are locally retained until network connectivity is restored, at which point any data are communicated back to headquarters.

With traditional text-based apps, it is also difficult for operators to give any geographic meaning to areas of interest, and it is even more difficult for supervisors to visualise the locations or sites and therefore assign work to maximise efficiency.

To keep track of work with konect, roads are tagged as they are inspected so crews can easily see what work has been completed and what roads remain to inspect. Defect lists arrive at the office electronically, marked on maps with standardised descriptions and photographs.

Back in the office, konect also makes it much easier for supervisors to identify the critical works and prioritise works by geographic region. Once authorised, works are available for immediate execution by the work crews, who may very well already be in the field.

Future of field work In an age when technology is available to improve productivity, economy and safety, a system like konect ticks all the boxes of just about any organisation that relies on field operations.

As part of the Global GBM early adopter program, road inspection is one of many diverse applications benefiting from konect, including mineral exploration, environmental services, vegetation management, local government inspection, telecommunications and infrastructure maintenance.

Global GBM CEO Ken Moule sees this as a new revolution in which geospatial technologies can contribute to the bottom line of any business that has personnel who work outside the office.

“Office automation transformed our businesses in the 80’s,” Mr Moule said. “It heralded a massive productivity boost but that revolution failed to extend beyond the office door.”

“For the most part, data flow around field processes remains antiquated and inefficient. There is often limited head office visibility around what actually happens in the field and inefficient shuffling of paperwork and messages compared with how we run our office-based business systems.

“That means 30% of the global workforce is working with business systems that are over 30 years behind the times.”

As part of this revolution, Mr Moule envisages that thousands of organisations across the globe could benefit from a solution like konect.

“Just as the advent of economically priced PC systems was the catalyst for office automation, the recent availability of smartphones, mobile device savvy populace and wireless data has set the environment for automating field processes and directly linking them into the corporate workflow,” he said.

“Konect is about IT automation for field workers. It delivers operational efficiency.”

Konect will continue to evolve with a host of plans on the horizon to realise a future of corporate-wide electronic workflows across a range of industries.

To enable this, Global GBM is currently, among other things, building a web dashboard to present management insights, adding extensions to service WH&S compliance, moving towards crowd sourcing information on land conditions and the environment, as well as delivering new emergency management mapping solutions.

As for the Northern Territory workers though, it’s becoming increasingly hard to find an excuse to stop off at the Devil’s Marbles, Katherine Gorge or one of the many natural springs.

Anthony Wallace is the editor of Position magazine and Spatial Source and recently made the arduous journey from Alice Springs to Darwin, immensely enjoying each of the 1,500 kilometres. ■ The Northern Territory has a 35,725km road network, only 25 per cent of which is sealed.

The Kata Tjuta (left) and Uluru rock formations cover just a fraction of the Northern Territory’s extensive remote areas. Copernicus Sentinel data (2015)/ESA.

Konect spatially enables workers both in the field and office.

www.spatialsource.com.au 23

feature

Some key numbers relating to SCIRT web-map.

Getting it sorted GIS at SCIRT: the start of a legacy.

With a budget of over two billion and a lifespan of five years, rebuilding the infrastructure in Christchurch was set to be the largest engineering project undertaken in New Zealand.

ABIGAIL WALSHE

T

he Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuilding Team (SCIRT) was created to undertake repairs to horizontal infrastructure damaged by the 2010-11 earthquakes in Christchurch, including the ‘three waters’ pipe networks transporting waste water, storm water and water supply, in addition to repairing roads, bridges and retaining walls.

Christchurch City Council (CCC) owns, operates and maintains thousands of assets that make up the underground infrastructure. The key to understanding the scope of works required and planning accordingly was having available the information that represented, at an individual asset level, what was damaged, where it was damaged and how badly it was damaged.

SCIRT is a long program of over 700 shorter projects, each working through defined consecutive phases, from asset assessment, design, construction and back to CCC via handover. At SCIRT the sheer number of projects means that in reality, all of the project phases can happen at

24 position October/November 2016

the same time, with each phase having emphasis at different times throughout the program and GIS tasks supporting all phases at the same time.

As SCIRT’s program reaches its final year in 2016, the GIS team at SCIRT continues to play a major role and as part of SCIRT’s Legacy project, it’s time to start sharing some of those key learnings.

The past four years has seen the GIS team grow from two to ten, and from being a portal for the display of data and information via the SCIRT web-map to being a fully integrated system within the organisation and within the wider city rebuilding. Systems have been developed wherein task automation, the creation of many smart online tools, setting standards and understanding users’ needs have all been key factors to this success

A single source of information As part of SCIRT’s Integrated Services Team (IST), responsible for the overarching tactical co-ordination of rebuilding the infrastructure, GIS is positioned in the Commercial Team under the umbrella of Business Systems, along with Business Intelligence (BI), which is responsible for the data warehouse.

The data warehouse stores project and program management information, while GIS is the home of the asset and engineering spatial datasets.

The SCIRT GIS system consumes vast amounts of data from many sources – both spatial and non-spatial from multiple organisations – and in different formats specific to those organisations’

internal logic, rules and specifications.

These data sources have been taken ‘as is’ and then transformed, validated and stored in a consistent spatial format and coordinate system. Tools and processes are provided on top of this, in order to present meaningful information through reports, graphs and visualisations that can be used for different purposes by different stakeholders, enabling informed decisions to be made and leading to the best outcomes for the SCIRT program and the people of Christchurch and New Zealand.

The standardised spatial data storage and web and mapping services have been implemented with ESRI ArcGIS software, supported by FME for spatial data transformation, as well as 12d Synergy for data storage and management. FME has been used to create nearly all of the data manipulation and automation workflows in SCIRT’s GIS system.

With the technologies available and a low level of customisation, significant software development has been avoided and upgrades to the newest versions of ArcGIS and FME have been easily deployed, in particular implementing FME Server in 2014, which extended the GIS team’s capabilities and allowed outside users without the software to run automated tools.

A SCIRT web-map was created as a portal to all of the information required by the organisation, allowing secure access to over 600 data layers and giving over 1500 users a current, easilyinterrogated and quickly-accessible city-wide view of all their required

information. Tools available include querying, drawing and annotating static maps as well as overlaying, printing, editing and time animations. Users are given one of 32 view configurations, customising views of the data depending on need and security level.

Understanding our users With a program the size of SCIRT, change was inevitable and required flexibility and innovation in this GIS team’s approach to data management and integration, within the resources available. It was important that what was done was not only relevant and could add value, but that it would create efficiencies to saving both time and money, as well as providing the best information available.

A key factor in achieving this was simply talking to people. We talked to our users to understand what information was required, in what form, and what it was they were trying to achieve; we talked to the data suppliers to understand their data, issues and requirements; we talked to SCIRT’s contractors to understand how they collect, interpret and use data; and we talked to the client to understand the full context of their data and to futureproof the system.

The more we listened the more our users understood what we could do, the more solutions we could provide and the more work we had to do, meaning we had to find ways of working smarter. Although some manual tasks and traditional user requests (for example, maps) were inevitable, understanding the scale of the task at hand and the possibilities of the technology available we focused upon reducing manual tasks and increasing throughput with the same staff levels.

Systems integration at SCIRT.

Working smarter

“SCIRT is a long program of over 700 shorter projects, each working through defined consecutive phases, from asset assessment, design and construction.”

A planned program of works for city-wide rebuilding.

Initially, the basic solution was to create workflows that could be validated and automated to complete update and data dissemination tasks, utilising live feeds where possible. These outputs are validated thoroughly, before automation to varying degrees from fully-automated scheduled updates to stakeholder-initiated updates.

Since 2014, the advent of FME Server meant many workflows and tools have been made available online, allowing complete automation of data updates through scheduled processes. It also provided self-validation tools for nonspatial users to give SCIRT’s own data creators – our contractors – a full view of their outputs, shifting ownership for complete and correct data back to the source. The automation of repeatable tasks and processes has been fully embraced by the team and in 2015 we successfully automated 90% of our weekly data updates to scheduled processes using FME Server.

Automation of tasks is a key focus and one that we continue to expand. The automation of the post-construction asset survey, data validation and handover process is an example of this. The GIS team has developed a comprehensive guideline for surveying all 3-waters assets that outlines survey requirements and specifications for spatial and attribute information, a new as-built data format to transfer all survey information as per required standard into SCIRT GIS automated processes, and an automated data flow of as-built data from site data collection and self-service online data validation through to automated spatial data creation, quality assurance, mapping, updating and reporting.

By taking a large, complex and mostly manual procedure and applying sense, logic, testing, education and training, a process has been created www.spatialsource.com.au 25

feature Technologies used by the GIS team to process, transform and validate data.

“By taking a large, complex and mostly manual procedure and applying sense, logic, testing, education and training, a process has been created that gives confidence that output data is fit for use and is of a high standard.” that gives confidence that output data is fit for use and of a high standard.

This is a concept that can be applied anywhere and one that is now serving as a blueprint for the development of a national As-Built Standard.

By leading communications on the processes and data requirements of other teams outside of GIS and also building relationships with the users and maintenance teams of 12d, InfoNet and AutoCAD systems used at SCIRT, an integrated system has been created where asset information flows cohesively through from design to construction and handover.

An example of this is the creation of a single design layer on the SCIRT webmap. Design decisions for assets can be sourced from either 12d model or the asset assessment spreadsheet where the design decision is updated from several asset assessment sources. The process created by GIS takes both of these sources, validates the data, checking the pipe actions are shown correctly, a single action for each pipe has been created and can be used for financial and forward work load planning, network modelling and project connectivity.

Our legacy As a result of the organisational structure within SCIRT, both GIS and BI teams sit under the Commercial Team, enabling successful collaboration whereby the benefits of each system have been leveraged to provide solutions neither could achieve in isolation, and avoiding duplication of source data. The advantage that GIS provided was to be the conduit between the two, both reading from and writing into the data warehouse, providing enriched results.

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By amalgamating BI and GIS data, it is possible to demonstrate what money has been spent and where, how quickly and by whom, and remaining budgets, all of which feed into strategic decision making as part of SCIRT’s monthly board report. The integration of people, data and systems at SCIRT has demonstrated benefits to the program through time and cost savings and richer outcomes for stakeholders.

By understanding our users’ needs, the possibilities of available technology and also the benefits of systems integration and embracing automation, an integrated system has been created that in terms of pipe networks represent what has happened to a particular asset over time and also incorporates vital program information such as the SCIRT schedule, costs and project status. This is a holistic system that can be used by multiple users, showing data and information from multiple sources, representing multiple phases, and provided through multiple views.

By breaking down the barriers to supplying data, having conversations with all of our users, being flexible in our approach, implementing change and functionality upon request and taking client requirements into account, a system has been created that is easy to use, current and adaptable for the future.

Even though we are now at a stage in the program where many processes have been set up and are functioning well, these systems are continually being improved following feedback from the internal client, a focus shift or upgrades in technology as SCIRT moves towards its program goals.

Abigail Walshe is a GIS Consultant with Jacobs and has been on secondment to the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuilding Team (SCIRT) since 2011 as part of the GIS team. ■

The SCIRT Project Pipeline approach to creating projects.

Post-Construction Asset Survey before and after guideline development and process automation.

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feature

Leveraging location intelligence to find missing persons Authorities in New South Wales have more than a few spatial tricks up their sleeves when undertaking search and rescue.

NIGEL LESTER

T

hey’re the men and women in white overalls you might see on the news abseiling down a cliff to rescue a stranded bushwalker or battling raging floodwaters to pluck victims to safety.

The NSW Police Rescue and Bomb Disposal Unit provides round-the-clock emergency response for general land and vertical rescue, bomb appraisal and disposal, and coordination of land search and rescue operations. They also provide specialist support services such as access to dangerous and difficult-to-reach places, crime scene searches, and support to police negotiators by restraining suicidal persons.

These elite police officers inspired the 1990’s Australian TV show ‘Police Rescue’, starring Gary Sweet and Sonia Todd. In reality, human lives are at stake if they don’t get it right and respond with precision and accuracy. In order to find a missing person or conduct a rescue operation, location-based information and analysis play a critical role.

Senior Constable Phillip Downes is the Team Leader of the Hume Local

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Area Command Police Rescue Squad, based in Goulburn, and is responsible for coordinating land search operations for the Hume Local Area Command and surrounding NSW police region. When it comes to coordinating and planning search missions, it is imperative that the Rescue Squad collates all relevant information quickly in order to save precious time.

“Before we deploy the search teams into the field,” said Senior Constable Downes, “we need to capture and collate all relevant information so that we hit the target as soon as possible once deployed.”

During the search for a missing person, the first step is to identify the last known position (LKP) of the missing person.

“Quite often we receive a phone call from the next of kin to report their loved one missing and they provide whatever information they can about when they were last seen,” said Senior Constable Downes.

“Sometimes the missing person activates a distress beacon, which provides us with a latitude/longitude coordinate, and sometimes the missing

“In order to find a missing person or conduct a rescue operation, location-based information and analysis play a critical role.”

Tracks are often searched as a first response. An accurate buffer either side of the track is plotted to ensure effective cover of that search area.

person themselves make a call from their mobile phone to report that they are lost. They describe where they are or where they think they are. That could be the intersection of two gullies, or the description of a road or a creek. Other times we have no information at all apart from an apparent LKP and the fact that the person is missing, presumably lost and possibly injured in the wilderness.”

In today’s digital era, smartphones or satellite navigation devices can provide search teams with vital positional coordinate data, such as latitude/ longitude, MGRS, and UTM, from which to begin their search. Other information, such as missing persons behaviour data, which is categorised and based on Australian real case statistics, is accurately plotted and overlaid on maps to provide police rescue search coordinators with the information they need to start the search in the best and most probable location. Senior Constable Downes’ Rescue Squad uses Pitney Bowes location intelligence technology to piece together all of this location and related data to find the missing person.

“Information comes from a variety of sources and in different formats, so it’s imperative that we can very rapidly collate this information in order to identify the search area as accurately as possible and get the search teams out into the field as quickly as possible,” said Senior Constable Downes.

“It is vital that we identify the location accurately as it could mean the difference between searching at the top of a cliff versus the bottom. If we need to abseil down a cliff to reach someone at the bottom, we need to know what equipment and personnel to send into the field.”

Searching bush tracks and trails is often one of the first responses in a search and rescue operation. Coordinators need to identify all tracks in the search area and create, for example, a 10-20 metre buffer on either side of the track to find

a lost person who may have wandered off. Search teams also carry GPS devices to capture the paths they have already covered. The MapInfo system is able to download this data, and overlay it with other maps, to enable air and ground search teams to maximise their search efforts and uncover where to look next.

Close collaboration between the NSW Police Rescue Squad and other emergency service agencies such as NSW Ambulance Service, NSW State Emergency Service, Rural Fire Service, Volunteer Rescue Association, and National Parks and Wildlife Service, is required to ensure the best possible outcome. Agencies are required to share information and data with each other quickly and easily.

“Having a single point of truth for all our mapping data and being able to easily output that information ensures seamless collaboration with other agencies” said Senior Constable Downes. “PolSAR, which is based on MapInfo technology, is our one-stop shop for all mapping and location-based information.

“Without it, we wouldn’t be able to perform our search and rescue missions in an efficient and timely manner."

Location intelligence is critical for search and rescue operations. Simply having easy access to location based information is not enough. When lives are at stake, precision and accuracy is paramount. Refining the search area based on accurate location intelligence gives elite officers the best chance of saving lives during emergency rescues.

Nigel Lester is managing director for Australia and New Zealand at Pitney Bowes. An experienced leader, Nigel has worked in various senior executive roles with Pitney Bowes both in Australia & South East Asia. He is passionate about helping government agencies and businesses take advantage of digital technologies to build truly customer centric business models. ■

www.spatialsource.com.au 29

feature

Entering the

‘seventh dimension’ of BIM Achieving better accuracy and speed for on-site data acquisition.

A

s a concept, Building Information Modelling (BIM) first came about in the 1970s, but its methods have been refined considerably since then. Widely used by city planners, architects and civil engineers today, BIM enables stakeholders to better make high-impact decisions by providing timely, relevant information.

According to the National BIM Standard - United States, BIM is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility, shared as a knowledge resource to form a reliable basis for decisions during its lifecycle, which is defined as existing from earliest conception to demolition.

BIM facilitates the collaborative process of designing a building, putting varied types of information all on one coherent system of computer models, as opposed to separate sets of drawings. More than just geometry, BIM covers spatial relationships, light analysis, geographic information, and quantities or properties of building components. Today, a typical BIM file contains data that extends all the way to the ‘seventh dimension’. This includes the basic, traditional two-dimensional technical design drawings of buildings; threedimensional (width, height, and depth) spatial drawings; ‘fourth dimension’ of time (4D BIM); ‘fifth dimension’ of cost (5D BIM); ‘sixth dimension’ of sustainability (6D BIM); and ‘seventh dimension’ of facilities management (7D BIM).

Apart from its ability to collate discrete sets of information, BIM allows data to be updated in real time, which means various stakeholders will have instant and common access to the latest information.

Simply by being on the same page,

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companies have avoided costly mistakes of error and rework, and also enjoyed enormous benefits of time savings and greater levels of accuracy in estimation.

On-site data acquisition for BIM As the usage of BIM evolved over the last two decades, the user community has found laser scanning technology to be useful in numerous applications.

Laser scanning solutions have shaped the way teams work together, making it easier for them to communicate, collaborate and solve problems that may crop up in the course of a project.

Overall, such BIM solutions have resulted

in highly informed projects completed in a shorter time, as well as at a lower cost.

In practice, laser scanning is used by BIM specialists for site documentation purposes, right from a facility’s structural design phase to its post-construction architectural phase. With the data, users can create 2D drawings, conduct inspections, create 3D building modelling, and even generate site plans that are registered to global positioning coordinates.

Practitioners are preferring laser scanners over traditional tools such as total stations, because laser scanners provide them with much more detail and data points, which have proven useful when generating final deliverables of a project.

Conventional Surveying Equipment

FARO Laser Scanner Focus3D X

Type of data collected

Points and string data only

Anything that is within line of sight and visible to the human eye - position, points, and even photos.

Scanning speed

50 - 150 points per hour

Up to 976,000 points per second

Scan resolution

Average 1 point per square meter

> 2 million points per square meter

Type of data output

Usually a 2D or 3D CAD Plan

Detailed 2D/3D CAD, 3D model, point cloud data in DTM, DEM, DSM, or Contour formats, and more.

Sample scan result

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Hexagon Geospatial, a division of Intergraph Corporation, has registered trademarks in many countries throughout the world. For information about the countries in which the trademarks are registered, please visit our Trademarks Page hexagongeospatial.com/legal/trademarks.

feature “Simply by being on the same page, companies have avoided costly mistakes of error and rework.”

A quick comparison of conventional surveying equipment and laser scanning technology reveals that the modern laser scanner provides several advantages over traditional tools. Whether in terms of speed, scan detail, or flexibility of data output, the FARO Laser Scanner as an example surpasses the conventional equipment, the total station. With laser scanning technology, BIM specialists complete surveying tasks much more quickly and obtain reports with more information textured information that includes resolution, position, and colour.

The following section specifically highlights how users can benefit from using laser scanning technology in their projects.

2D drawings Many of today’s building and infrastructure projects lack as-built documentation of the existing facility, and 2D plans or existing drawings are rarely available for old buildings. This has made it challenging for planning and redesigning works to take place. In addition, the conventional total station is inadequate for capturing physical structures efficiently, since it can only capture a few points at a time. Not only is the method time- and labour-intensive, the data obtained would be incompatible with a point-cloud processing software, limiting the possibilities of its usage.

3D scanning technology could, however, be capable of addressing the need of digitisation for BIM practitioners.

Both tripod-based and handheld scanning devices quickly and reliably document objects, structures, or entire rooms with high precision, and their portability makes it easy for scans to be conducted anytime,

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anywhere. Post-processing of the point cloud data obtained by the devices can then be performed with software such as FARO’s VirtuSurv, PointSense and SCENE platforms, further simplifying and streamlining the process for users.

Structural inspection Structural damage to buildings can cause substantial economic losses to property owners, and can also reduce a property’s current and future value.

Structural inspections enable owners to take preventative measures or to make necessary rectifications.

With traditional surveying tools, data capture for structural inspection is slow and inflexible. Moreover, the extent of damage cannot be monitored with certainty, and the evidence is documented only in 2D images. On the other hand, laser scanning can provide the information required for an effective assessment. For instance, an analysis of concrete floors for slab flatness will indicate if any area needs to be adjusted, after which the BIM specialist can determine the volume of material needed for that job – reducing wastage and creating better cost management overall.

In addition, laser scanning technology can also be used to verify that components of a building have been installed according to its original design, which is helpful for cost management, insurance claims, or legal disputes. The FARO Focus3D can perform as-built documentation with millimetre-accuracy (±2mm), capturing details such as pipes, HVAC systems, structural steel, floors, and even rebar in concrete slabs throughout a building. If any discrepancies are

An example of a 3D building model created with PointSense Revit through post-processing of the point cloud data.

observed when compared against a design, property owners can either make alterations or rectifications as necessary.

3D building information modelling Contractors of building and infrastructure projects often do not keep a record of current construction or maintenance documents of the existing facility. Yet, to acquire digital survey data of a large space by utilising conventional methods would be too time-consuming and laborious. In any case, the incompatibility of the data acquired would have made it difficult for the team to import the information into any of the popular CAD programs available in the market.

In a similar fashion to which 2D drawings can be generated from the scans obtained by FARO Focus3D, producing 3D building information modelling is also a breeze with FARO 3D documentation.

The FARO VirtuSurv software acts as a flexible interface to allow users to import and export scan data for use on various platforms. The FARO PointSense Building software, an AutoCAD plug-in, then efficiently processes the 3D scan data with a range of available tools, which allows a user to manipulate the information for specific project deliverables.

Laser scanning technology enables a reduction in design man-hours with automated tools (e.g. wall alignment and wall fitting tool) when creating building models. ■

® MicroSurvey is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by MicroSurvey Software Inc. MicroSurvey is part of Hexagon.

feature

Aboriginal answer

Using drones to save a sensitive Australian heritage site.

F

or the past two years, Australian UAV has undertaken an annual drone survey of the Lake Victoria shoreline. This immense heritage project brings with it three key challenges: big birds, even bigger datasets, and lots of very fine sand.

Lake Victoria in Australia is a site in need of tender loving care. Located in a remote part of western NSW, 268km east of Adelaide, it has seen significant erosion to its shores and damage to many of its cultural heritage sites — such as aboriginal burial grounds dating back 6,000 years — due to continued water regulation over the past eight decades.

In 1994, about 240 burials were found in six burial grounds on the Frenchmans Islands, at the southern end of the lake.

Burials were made in the low sand ridges that became islands after 1927, when the lake level was raised by water regulation. The higher lake level led to increased erosion of areas previously rarely flooded, and exposed much Aboriginal cultural material.

The presence of large numbers of burial sites and the natural landscape of the lake and its environs are important components of its spiritual and cultural significance to the Barkindji Aboriginal people, and the Murray Darling Basin Authority moved to protect the rich cultural site.

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Drone decision In 2014, the monitoring contract was awarded for the first time to Australian UAV, a fast-growing surveying, mapping and aerial photography provider, which today has five offices across south east Australia. The contract was then recommissioned in 2015, with follow-up flights in subsequent years also possible.

“The Murray Darling Basin Authority has commissioned us to perform an aerial survey of the entire Lake Victoria shoreline for two years running,” said company director James Rennie. “This monitoring work charts the movement of sand around the lake and documents the effects of vegetation establishment on preventing the exposure of Aboriginal heritage.”

This kind of large-scale aerial monitoring, at such a challenging remote location, would not have been possible prior to drone technology, Mr Rennie said, unless walking the entire area using terrestrial surveying equipment.

“However, this would demand a huge number of man-hours compared to the

time it takes to map the area with a drone,” he explained.

Initially, Australian UAV did consider employing manned aircraft to collect the photography it required but, Mr Rennie said, “This resolution was not deemed high enough and using planes was just not cost-effective”.

The team’s two site surveys to date have therefore employed Australian UAV’s fleet of senseFly eBee and eBee RTK drones.

Drone methodology The data outputs required by the client include RGB and NIR aerial orthomosaics of Lake Victoria’s entire 114km perimeter, at a resolution of 3.5cm per pixel, and a full digital surface model (DSM) of the area, at the same resolution and tied to the Australian Height Datum by using ground controls.

“We’re talking about a huge project,” Mr Rennie said, “covering approximately 5,000 hectares or 12,355 acres in total.”

To tackle this mammoth undertaking, the team employs two drones for each trip, often flown simultaneously, with

“We had 35 flights this year that were cut short by attacks from birds of prey.”

A single RGB orthomosaic, just one small part of Australian UAV’s huge Lake Victoria survey.

CASE STUDY

One of the project’s many eagleeyed observers, captured in one of the drone’s NIR images.

Aboriginal answer – using drones to map a sensitive Australian heritage site

For the past two years Australian UAV has undertaken an annual drone survey of the Lake Victoria shoreline. This immense heritage project brings with it three key challenges: big birds, even bigger datasets and lots of very fine sand.

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Drone decision

Lake Victoria in Australia is a site in need of tender loving care.

Located in a remote part of western New South Wales (NSW), 268 km east of Adelaide, it has seen significant erosion to its shores and damage to many of its cultural heritage sites—such as burial grounds dating back 6,000 years—due to continued water regulation over the past eight decades.

In 2014 the monitoring contract was awarded for the first time to Australian UAV, a fast-growing survey, mapping and aerial photography provider, which today has five offices across south east Australia. The contract was then recommissioned in 2015, with follow-up flights in subsequent years also possible.

“The Murray Darling Basin Authority has commissioned us to perform an aerial survey of the entire Lake Victoria shoreline for two years running,” says company director James Rennie. “This monitoring work charts the movement of sands around the lake and documents the effects of vegetation establishment on preventing the exposure of Aboriginal heritage.”

This kind of large scale aerial monitoring, at such a challenging remote location, would not have been possible prior to drone technology, Rennie says, unless walking the entire area using terrestrial survey equipment. “However, this would demand a huge number of man hours compared to the time it takes to map the area with a drone,” Rennie explains.

One of the project’s 137 eBee flight plans, shown in eMotion.

As a result, annual monitoring of the lake’s vegetation, shoreline and cultural heritage is now required by the site’s Aboriginal Heritage Impact Permit, issued by the NSW government’s Office of Environment & Heritage to manage harm or potential harm to aboriginal objects and places.

Initially, Australian UAV did consider employing manned aircraft to collect the photography it required but, Rennie says, “This resolution was not deemed high enough and using planes was just not cost effective”.

senseFly is a Parrot company. Copyright © senseFly 2015. All rights reserved. senseFly Ltd., 1033 Cheseaux-Lausanne, Switzerland.

1

flight planning and monitoring tasks all handled by the drones’ eMotion software.

One drone carries an NIR camera on board, the other an RGB sensor. Whilst one UAV maps a linear section of the lake shore, the other maps the same area but using perpendicular flight lines. The resulting NIR and RGB images are then processed together using Postflight Terra 3D to create what Mr Rennie said “is a very comprehensive DSM.” Flight overlaps are typically high, at 75% and 80%, as returning to this remote site to re-fly a section is not a realistic option. “A team of two local surveyors also sets 500 ground control points to position our drone data with the accuracy the client requires.”

In terms of drone statistics, each annual survey requires approximately 136 eBee flights of around 28 minutes each to cover the lake’s full perimeter. This leads to the capturing of more than 40,000 images in total.

“For this we spend seven days in the field,” Mr Rennie reported.

Australian UAV employed two senseFly eBee drones, which were often flown simultaneously.

Preying on technology The sheer size of the project is not the only challenge, however. Birds of prey also come into play and these feathered invaders have taken a liking (or hatred) to the team’s eBees more than once.

“We had 35 flights this year that were cut short by attacks from birds of prey,” Mr Rennie said. “We used the eMotion software’s ‘Climb’ button for bird avoidance on many occasions and saved the eBee in all but one case.”

“That eBee was brought down due to a dislodged propeller, but the emergency landing function ensured there was no further damage and it was quickly located.”

The lakeside environment has also led the team to adapt its drone use.

“The lake is surrounded by fine sand, which creates a challenge for camera lenses and the drone’s motors, so we have tools on hand to remove any sand, should this cause a problem,” Mr Rennie said. “Where possible, we also set landing areas on the harder wet sand or further from the lake shoreline where there is some vegetation.

“In areas where landing on soft sand is unavoidable, our operators catch the eBees, which is something we couldn’t do with

any other drone. This was determined to be safe because with the eBee its motor is no longer running at landing, and the mass of the airframe is very low.”

Aboriginal answer Following several weeks of data processing back at base, Mr Rennie and the team produce the client’s key deliverables: a full DSM spanning the entire shoreline of Lake Victoria and a full set of drone-sourced NIR and RGB orthomosaic geoTIFF files.

The project findings indicated that the establishment of vegetation on the foreshore was attenuating the sand transport. This, in turn, will protect the significant heritage features. As a result, vegetation protection measures are in place to facilitate this.

“This remains an annual project and the client has been very happy with the results thus far,” Mr Rennie reported.

“Collecting reliable and cost-effective aerial images has, in many cases, changed the way our clients do their business.

We anticipate further ongoing growth, and our eBee drones will be a central workhorse to facilitate that.” ■ www.spatialsource.com.au 35

new products

Automatic ground control point system for aerial surveys Sydney-based Propeller Aero has created the first complete workflow with the release of its new AeroPoints ground control point system, which automatically determines location through satellite positioning or GNSS. Whereas users would previously need to perform traditional surveying by total station or precise GNSS, now they can simply deploy AeroPoints, press one button and capture the data.

This method then integrates directly with Propeller’s cloud-based processing software Propeller Aero for processing and analytics.

“Drones can fly over a site and capture incredibly valuable data for surveyors and engineers in just minutes,” said Rory San Miguel, Propeller’s co-founder and co-CEO. “But if you want accurate data, you need to spend hours on site creating ground control points before the drone flight.”

AeroPoints are essentially smart ground control points that reduce this burden by making it easy for a user to perform survey-accurate mapping using drones.

The patent-pending technology is claimed to provide a world-first way around the two major roadblocks to commercial drone adoption: accuracy and efficiency.

Software integrating with BIM, GIS and CAD LISTECH has announced the immediate availability of the next major release of surveying and geospatial software LISTECH Neo with terrain modelling, volume calculation and imagery functions.

With an integrated 3D/2D environment for viewing information with extremely fast graphics in a modern interface, Neo now also offers the creation of an unlimited number of terrain models of any size. Users can quickly add contours at their preferred intervals with full control of label placement and clipping of contour lines.

They can calculate and report volumes and areas of cut-and-fill from models to a base plane.

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Neo is suitable for combining, editing and moving data between various office and/or field systems. In this latest update of Neo, the new Image GeoRef module enables clear viewing of images from RPAS (UAV), satellites and maps in numerous formats, serving as a backdrop for vector data. Online imagery from services such as the Hexagon Imagery Program (HxIP), Esri World Imagery, OpenStreetMap plus others, can be connected to display dynamic georeferenced images in the new Image Connect module.

Neo seamlessly transfers information to and from BIM, GIS, CAD, Field Sensors and various other systems.

For more information visit listech.com.

AeroPoints are designed to be visible from the air and capable of quickly determining their own positions down to 2cm absolute accuracy using postprocessed kinematic (PPK) GNSS positioning. They are also solar-powered, durable and weather-resistant.

To use AeroPoints, users simply lay them down, fly their drone, and then pick them up again. They then automatically connect to a wireless or mobile hotspot when possible to upload captured positioning data.

For more information visit www. propelleraero.com/aeropoints.

Surveying suite combining GNSS, total station and field computer Topcon Positioning Group has announced a new suite featuring four integrated products — three hardware ones ‘fused’ by a single software — designed to provide professionals with a powerful and complete surveying system. The Topcon Elite Surveying Suite includes the new GT series of robotic total stations, HiPer HR hybrid GNSS receiver, FC-5000 field computer and MAGNET 4.0 software system. The trio of geo-positioning products brings flagship Topcon technology together in the one system.

The Topcon Ultrasonic Direct Drive motors available within the new GT series total station have a turning speed of up to 180 degrees per second. Built on the foundation of the HiPer series of GNSS receivers, the new HiPer HR is the world’s

smallest and lightest receiver. The third hardware in the suite is the FC-5000 field computer with 15 hours battery life, two built-in cameras and a 7-inch sunlightreadable display.

For more information visit www. positionpartners.com.au.

Reality capture integration for geospatial workflows ArcGIS Pro users can now analyse and visualise the real world in 3D within their GIS workflows using ContextCapture-created i3S models.

ContextCapture allows users to easily produce high-resolution 3D models of existing conditions using photos taken with any digital camera, whether handheld or mounted to a vehicle or UAV. The software uses these images to generate a detailed reality mesh incorporating the referenced photography.

For more information visit www. bentley.com/en/products/brands/ contextcapture.

Streamlined satellite imagery acquisition service Airbus Defence and Space Intelligence has launched its online ‘One Tasking’ satellite imagery service.

Commissioning a satellite and obtaining imagery, exactly when required, is now risk-free, quick and easy.

With ‘One Tasking’, acquiring imagery requires the user only to choose the resolution, define the area of interest, schedule the acquisition window, point and click. ‘One Tasking’ is built into the GeoStore interface and features seamless automation.

The user can customise the imagery to specification, accept the quotation and when clear of clouds, automated delivery of validated images occurs within 12 hours of acquisition. Access is 24/7, so users can respond to an urgent need outside business hours.

For more information visit http:// bit.ly/2aF9uvP.

Complete RPAS workflow with three-part package Position Partners has partnered with Australian drone startup Propeller Aero to offer an end-to-end Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) bundle

to deliver survey-grade results in one integrated workflow.

More specifically, the package includes a professional-grade RPAS from leading

global manufacturer DJI, Propeller Aero’s cloud-based drone data platform and the recently unveiled AeroPoints ground control system.

USers can choose from either the popular, sub-two kilogram Phantom 4 aircraft or the new M100 high performance quadcopter, which offers longer flight times, advanced collision avoidance and enhanced in-flight stability.

What makes the bundles surveygrade, said Position Partners’ national RPAS manager Gavin Docherty, is the new AeroPoints active ground control system: “AeroPoints are the only ground control points in the world that deliver absolute MGA (Map Grid of Australia) coordinates, with built-in GNSS, PPK, WiFi and solar panel technology,” he said.

For more information call 1300 867 266 or visit www.positionpartners.com.au. www.spatialsource.com.au 37

sssi

President’s report The state awards and conferences season begins

Bernard O’Sullivan

SSSI Board of Directors 2016 President – Bernard O’Sullivan President Elect – Gaby van Wyk Treasurer – Jonathan Saxon Director – Alex Leith Director – Zaffar Mohamed-Ghouse Director – Craig Smtih Director – Kerry Smyth Company Secretary – James Curnow

Just a few weeks ago we began this year’s state conferences and awards season with SID2016 (Spatial Information Day 2016), in South Australia. The South Australians have a great event that kicks goals for the industry year after year.

This was my third year attending this event and I can say it is truly one of the best run events on the calendar. The local SSSI staff and volunteer committee worked tirelessly in the months, weeks and days leading up to the event and I must congratulate them on yet another great year.

This year I was invited to open the event and was also asked to be the MC at the SASEA dinner. This was a first for me, but I’m always up for a challenge. I think even with a few points where I stumbled over local place names I managed fairly well.

Once the after-dinner entertainment started I felt much better. This year there was a hypnotist and that was good for some of the ‘volunteers’ and not so good for others.

All in all, it was great entertainment for those people in the audience.

Megan Lewis, David Floreani

Consultative Council for 2016 President/EMS Rep – Bernard O’Sullivan Treasurer – Jonathon Saxon President Elect – Gaby van Wyk NT Rep – Rob Sarib QLD Rep – Matthew Fry WA Rep – Kerry Smyth NSW Rep – Gaby van Wyk VIC Rep – Werner Hennecke SA Rep – Franco Rea TAS Rep – Alex Leith ACT Rep – Greg Ledwidge RS&P Rep – Craig Smith HC Rep – Richard Cullen SIC Rep – Zaffar Mohamed-Ghouse LS Rep – Lindsay Perry YP Rep – Richard Syme Company Secretary – James Curnow

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What is BlueBays?

Congratulations to all individual and industry award winners from the evening. Special congratulations go to David Floreani, who won the SASEA 2016 Spatial Professional of the Year Award.

David has been a great contributor to the spatial industry in South Australia and nationally, and has also been involved in the organising of SID for some years now, so a special thank you for all his effort this year.

Lyn Terrett, Nathan Daniels, Gary Maguire

Our past president Gary Maguire and his former team from the SA Department of Communities and Social Inclusion, including Nathan Daniels, won the industry award for ‘People and Community’ for their ingenious app called BlueBays. I asked Gary to tell me a little more about the app to pass on to the members to show just how some professionals are using spatial technology and knowledge within our industry and applying it to improve the lives of people in the broader community.

BlueBays is a free mobile phone app to help people with disability locate and share information about accessible car parking spaces in South Australia.

A major barrier to participation identified by people with disability is the inability to undertake journey planning effectively, due to a lack of information about the location and description of accessible car parking spaces (i.e. blue bays) for people with disability parking permits. South Australia has the second highest proportion of people aged over 65 years (ABS 3235.0) and the second highest rate of disability (ABS 4446.0) in Australia. As a result, there is a growing need for government, business, NGO and the broader community to meet the needs of people with disability and their

SSSI sustaining partners

families so that they can enjoy greater independence and participate as active members of society.

BlueBays taps the knowledge of the local community to assist in the identification and collection of data about accessible car parks and allows users to locate car parks, find information about their dimensions, nearby businesses and facilities, as well as other helpful observations. As a result, people can plan their journey with greater confidence.

BlueBays enables people with disability, facilitates inclusion and community engagement and strengthens independence.

BlueBays addresses a market gap in this sector as it is the only disability based mobile interactive mapping application and is the first application of its type in any geospatial form in South Australia where the application was built on the principle of utilising a commercial off-theshelf product for a public application. As a result of this approach Department for Communities and Social Inclusion GIS team was able to rapidly develop, refine and deploy into the market place whilst knowing the product was fully supported by the vendor, Esri Australia.

BlueBays is downloadable from two of the largest application market spaces, Apple App Store and Google Play.

Apple link: https://itunes.apple.com/au/ app/bluebays/id1050848001?mt=8 Google link: https://play.google. com/store/apps/details?id=com.dcsi. bluebays&hl=en “BlueBays: More than just a car park, it enables independence.”

Joe D’Aloia, Noel Gehren

Megan Lewis, Penny Baldock, Mary Lewitzka

Other honourable mentions were Noel Gehren, who took out the JB & JW Calder Award (the SA top surveying award), and Penny Baldock, who took out the first SA Women in Spatial award and called for

more female involvement and inclusion for our industry and institute.

SSSI Commission Chairs for 2016

Meanwhile, in Tasmania and Queensland …

Remote Sensing & Photogrammetry Commission Chair Craig Smith chair.rspc@sssi.org.au

We have also had the Tasmanian awards event and conference and the Queensland awards event, with Victoria and New South Wales very soon. I was lucky enough to attend the QSEA dinner last week, which was a great night and well planned and executed by Kellie Davidson (SSSI) and Kaye Cleland (SIBA). A big thank you to them and all others who made this event so good.

Honourable mentions from this dinner go to Tony Kirchner from Transport and Main Roads QLD (TMR), who, on behalf of his dedicated team, accepted this year’s SSSI QLD Chairman’s Award. This was given due to the support TMR and Tony have put to the certifications offered by SSSI. At the event, it was noted the great impact that ESP-AP Certification being supported by TMR had on the industry uptake of this benchmark certification.

Surveying standards for TMR with the inclusion of ESP-AP certification can be seen in Part 1. of the published standards at the following link: http://www.tmr.qld.gov.au/ business-industry/Technical-standardspublications/Surveying-standards Professional of the year in Queensland this year was awarded to Silvia Michael, who was definitely a crowd favourite and a deserving winner. Newly elevated SSSI Honorary Fellow Peter Swan presented this award.

The SIBA Chairman’s award went to long-time industry supporter, a guy we would all know and usually associate with the cocktail or happy hour sponsorship, and often the charity sponsor, Peter Kinne from DigitalGlobe. I can say it was the first time I had seen him lost for words.

Well done Peter.

New website for SSSI SSSI will be starting the task of a complete overhaul and renewal of its webpage with the national board approving Alex Leith (Tasmanian chairperson and board member) to project manage this upgrade. In the coming weeks and months, we will be consulting with the members as to the look and feel they want and inclusions and features they think will improve the site. Please keep an eye out for the surveys and feedback opportunities.

Land Surveying Commission Chair Lindsay Perry chair.lsc@sssi.org.au Hydrography Commission Chair Richard Cullen chair.hc@sssi.org.au Spatial Information & Cartography Commission Chair Hanno Klahn chair.sicc@sssi.org.au Engineering & Mining Surveying Commission Chair Bernard O’Sullivan chair.emsc@sssi.org.au SSSI Regional Chairs 2016 New South Wales Regional Chair Gaby Van Wyk chair.nsw@sssi.org.au ACT Regional Chair Greg Ledwidge chair.act@sssi.org.au Northern Territory Regional Chair Rob Sarib chair.nt@sssi.org.au Victoria Regional Chair Werner Hennecke chair.vic@sssi.org.au Queensland Regional Chair Matthew Fry chair.qld@sssi.org.au South Australia Regional Chair Franco Rea chair.sa@sssi.org.au Western Australia Regional Chair Kerry Smyth chair.wa@sssi.org.au Tasmania: Regional Chair Alex Leith chair.tas@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

Bernard O’Sullivan ESP-AP SSSI President www.spatialsource.com.au 39

sssi

Where have all the ‘droggies’ gone?

JOHN MASCHKE

Q

uite often we hear people bemoaning the apparent lack of hydrographic surveyors in the world. Indeed, there is a shortage of hydrographic surveyors, but why is this?

Currently there are just over 140 Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute (SSSI) members who have associated themselves with the Hydrography Commission, and 112 surveyors worldwide who are currently certified through the Australasian Hydrographic Surveyors Certification Panel (AHSCP).

The SSSI members are made up of Level 1 or Level 2 surveyors, and the majority of them are actively practicing either in the field or as survey/project managers. Within another organisation, the Australasian Hydrographic Society (AHS), there are about 230 active members; many of these are dual members of both the SSSI and AHS. This is not surprising, as the AHS is a ’learned society’ rather than a professional body representing the professional interests of hydrographic surveyors.

From the above, there is about 102 practicing hydrographic surveyors certified within the Australasian region. This does not seem to be many, considering that within the region there is what this author perceives as significant opportunities for those within the industry.

However, since the 1960s-1970s, when the North-West Shelf oil and gas boom and the opening of significant iron ore and coal fields around Australia helped grow hydrographic surveyor numbers, and the two global financial crises, the number of practicing surveyors appears to have fallen. Is the lack of funding a significant contributor to this reduction, and therefore, the inability to sustain

40 position October/November 2016

or grow the number of hydrographic surveyors? Obvious or not?

Other influences may be the everchanging semantics regarding the words ‘surveying’ or ‘surveyors’, or the changing environment, as in ‘climate change’. It can become very confusing at times when one tries to understand what actually defines a surveyor, let alone a hydrographic surveyor. When the author of this article began his career, there were surveyors of various types: land, hydrographic and mining. When these surveyors began their training, they were trained (generally) in surveying, and then specialised in their chosen fields. Now there are geomaticians trained in geomatics, and even hydrologists have gotten into the act and have a certificate in hydrography. What is the world coming to?

Even with hydrographic surveyors, there have been calls for increasing the number of specialisms within the field of hydrographic surveying. The most recent SSSI Hydrography Commission meeting in February 2016 put in place a working group to consider sub-specialisms that are intended to identify individuals who not only have their Level 1 or 2 competence, but also have a greater experience base in one or more of these specific industry practices (sub-specialism): • Nautical charting.

• Ports and harbours.

• Coastal zone management (and climate change).

• Offshore site assessment.

• Industrial offshore.

• Military hydrography.

• Inland waters hydrography (which brings in the hydrologists).

For those of you who follow the profession of hydrographic surveying, or are involved in the hydrographic industry in some way, you will note that there are two additional areas that are now included – climate change (for those hydrographic surveyors who specifically work in this area and with the

commission having an eye to the future), and inland waters hydrography (for those who work in the inland fresh water environment - and perhaps catching lots of red claw for their supper).

Having been described as a ‘dinosaur’ on many occasions, it was with some relief that the author observed the commission generally agreeing to keep the status quo regarding sub-specialisms apart from the additional two areas. Having a huge number of sub-specialisms, each of which might describe a very small part of the industry, could dilute the role of the hydrographic surveyor even further. We certainly don’t want to end up like the medical profession, where there are specialists for just about every part of the body or each facet of mental illness – it is nearly enough to make you jump off the deep end!

So what does the profession need?

Currently, the certification process assesses a potential hydrographic surveyor based on having well-grounded practical surveying theory, solid practical experience in hydrographic surveying, and further practical and theoretical vocational training during the course of their voyage towards Level 2 and Level 1 certification.

A problem exists in that only one venue provides the basic International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) Category B training in Australia and New Zealand. That one institute is the Royal Australian Navy at the Hydrographic School in Mosman, Sydney. Whilst it is possible to accept civilian students, the military venue has significant impediments to easily embrace civilian attendance. A second institution, the University of Otago discontinued its IHO recognition of what was a Category A course. While there continue to be hydrographic modules and the university degree is acceptable to the AHSCP certification process, simply not being IHO/IBSC recognised places an applicant into another certification clause, requiring more practical experience than those who hold a qualification from an IHO-recognised course.

SSSI sustaining partners

For those interested in a hydrographic surveying career, they generally have to travel overseas for training and/or experience. Further, it is difficult for employers to release staff for 6-12 months to attend training courses, and it is also expensive for either the employers or the individual staff to attend such courses. So the training and experience of prospective young hydrographic surveyors presents them with a bit of a ‘Catch 22’ situation.

What also happens is that some who wish to work in hydrographic surveying or related areas forgo the formal training and teach themselves. This is inherently fraught with risk, as they can’t teach themselves something they don’t know that they should know. Yes, complex, but so is hydrography.

They might also work in areas that don’t require certification, or the knowledge and experience that a professional hydrographic surveyor provides. These areas might include marine research, alternative energy industry, and fisheries, to name a few. This means that a lot of work that could be done by certified hydrographic surveyors with all of their experience is lost to them.

The hydrographic surveying profession has long suffered from a lack of self-

promotion. The author has never seen a ‘full-on’ media promotion of hydrographic surveyors such as Engineers Australia, Australian Medical Association or Australian Society of Certified Practicing Accountants have done on many occasions.

Consequently, when the question is asked: “What sort of work do you do?”, a reply of “I am a hydrographic surveyor” is met with a confused and blank look until (being a dinosaur) the author usually says I used to do what Captain Cook and Captain Matthew Flinders did, make charts.

There is, apparently, a worldwide shortage of hydrographic surveyors with very few coming in to the profession, and those who are still engaged in hydrographic surveying are generally getting on a bit. From the author’s observation over the years, hydrographic surveyors seem to be, on average, between 45-55 years old, male, and always ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’ (or extremely busy for those who don’t understand Australian colloquialism).

This tendency towards working too hard seems to a major reason why the profession doesn’t promote itself well – it doesn’t have the time. Fortunately, there

have been efforts within the past few years to promote the industry and profession through the efforts of the SSSI / NZIS and AHS. But these efforts are not able to fix the problem of a lack of education facilities to train hydrographic surveyors.

So, have we worked out why there is a lack of hydrographic surveyors yet? Probably not, but maybe this article provokes some thought about the shortfall in hydrographic surveyor numbers, the lack of educational institutions that can train more hydrographic surveyors, and the lack of promotion of the industry that most of us in the know regard as essential for the ‘Blue Economy’. You don’t know what the ‘Blue Economy’ is? Well, if you don’t, you may not be a hydrographic surveyor, and that is another story!

John Maschke AHSCP Level 1 Hydrography Commission – Northern Territory Region Representative References: www.clge.eu/documents/events/2/18_s_4_en.pdf.

Minutes of SSSI HCNC Meeting 4-5 February 2016.

The Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute is the not-for-profit national peak body representing and supporting the largest membership of spatial science and surveying professionals in Australia and New Zealand.

SSSI represents professionals in: Land Surveying, Spatial Information & Cartography, Remote Sensing & Photogrammetry, Hydrographic Surveying, Engineering & Mining Surveying and special interest groups including Women in Spatial and Young Professionals.

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sssi

Feel the map HANNO KLAHN

When we think about cartography and designing effective maps, we take into consideration whether our customers might be colour blind or if we potentially offend them by using a particularly colour, which is culturally insensitive.

However, don’t we assume that we can see the map in front of us? What happens if we can’t? I would like to share a great initiative from Hasso Plattner Insititute, which was developed in Potsdam, Germany. It uses 3D-printed displays to let blind people visualise and make sense of complex spatial data using a kind of display called Linespace.

The equipment gets activated and can be controlled by speech and gestures to print images in the form of raised plastic lines. The user can then share the printed shapes by fingertip pointing to where they want it on the surface, aided by tracking from an overhead depth camera. See https://youtu.be/9O_83U7P3bM and also www.newscientist.com/article/20766933d-printed-display-lets-blind-peopleexplore-images-by-touch/

Share in the success…

Cartography is everywhere! Did you know cartography is the heart and engine of Pokemon Go’s success? It uses the locational tracking built into players’ phones to encourage them to congregate in certain places to look for Pokemons. It was developed by an American start-up company from San Francisco with fewer than 100 employees, and its success lies in the ability to lay digital creatures over real-world environments and make people more aware of their surroundings and get them moving. It managed to more than double Nintendo’s share price.

… and join the committee If you would like to be part of the committee there are still positions available.

If you would like to help, I am calling out to all GISP-AP Certificate holders who believe in certification and would like to step up and get involved. Become

42 position August/September 2016

a member of this very elite and very rewarding group of professionals, the GISP-AP Certification Panel.

If you were always curious about what’s involved and how much commitment it really takes, then this message is for you.

The applications being assessed are very similar to the one you drafted yourself and just as you were, the person awaiting their certification is anxious to hear the result.

You as the certifier have to check that all claims for all three parts (Education, Professional Experience and Contributions to the Profession) are valid and eligible to be used as evidence so that certification can be awarded. Once you have assessed all claims and added all the points for each category (30 points for Education, 60 points for Professional Experience and eight

points for Contributions to the Profession), you add a comment in the relevant SharePoint folder, recommending whether or not the applicant should be awarded certification. The time this process takes depends on the quality of the application and on the number of certifiers available to collaborate on the result.

When you are applying for certification please keep this in mind! The time it takes to receive your GISP-AP Certification is directly related to the amount of evidence you provide.

If you would like to know more about the responsibilities and expectations of the role, please contact me directly at chair.sicc@sssi.org.au.

Hanno Klahn Spatial Information and Cartography Commission Chairperson

The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

October/November 2016 – No. 85

The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

OFF THE GRID But still in working Territory

Official publication of

inside Aerial accomplice Capturing more than expected

GIS to the rescue Finding missing persons spatially

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