The Customer
Spatial Services converts the wealth of land data it collects into a comprehensive and authoritative range of online and hard copy mapping products and services. These products and services help support a vast range of community, business and government activity - everything from tourism and land management, to electoral boundaries and bush fire control. As the official source of spatial land information for NSW, Spatial Services is responsible for maintaining a digital cadastral map of the State, which shows legal and other approved boundaries applying to land, as well as a digital topographic map, which includes its physical and surface features.
Spatial Services' Challenges
Spatial Services faced multiple challenges, mainly derived from the volume of data they must manage and deliver in a consumable format. These challenges included manual, inconsistent and disjointed data validation processes, lack of traceability of data, slow ingest processes with large amounts of manual handling, and difficulty finding and sharing data with stakeholders and citizens in an efficient manner.
To overcome these challenges, Spatial Services partnered with AC3 to implement a data lake strategy.
The Solution
The solution was to deliver an automated digital cadastre, recording property plan information, to manage the ingress and egress of plans and bundles of plans in NSW. This will become the backbone of the property creation process for all geospatial property transactions.
AC3 have built an event driven, cloud native solution for Spatial Services. The solution leverages the latest in cloud technology to manage data in an effective and efficient manner with the key goal of delivering more value to the citizens of NSW.
The digital technology that made up the solution included serverless code to manage the flow of information through the system. It also stores all persistent data in a content store for rapid, low cost access and records, with metadata in a NoSQL database service. In addition, serverless continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) is leveraged for the build and deployment process, which results in faster delivery of application improvements and more controlled deployments.
The motivating factors for the design choices were to deliver value to Spatial Services in by decreasing operational costs for the agency. In addition, the solution minimised complexity and maximised maintainability and extensibility, to support future growth.
Results
The ongoing customer benefits are far reaching. The solution not only positively impacts Spatial Services, but also each and every citizen of NSW. One clear benefit that extends to both Spatial Services and the citizen is the democratisation of public information, ensuring that it is accessible to everyone. In addition, Spatial Services derived value from gaining the ability to offer digital access to the cadastre to Local Government agencies to retrieve relevant information and embed it in their internal systems and processes.
AC3 enabled this with easy access and integration into the application via documented, standards-based APIs. The transformation also provided a reliable solution that streamlined data ingest and validation, with end to end traceability, reduced errors, and increased efficiencies whilst provided an end to end audit trail. The solution was designed by AC3 to utilise almost zero compute capacity when the data is at rest, resulting in very low ongoing infrastructure costs.