From this week's "Uni News", the newspaper of Melbourne University, Australia

http://www.unimelb.edu.au/uninews/GISteam.html

GIS team helps resolve borders

Maps have been a contentious issue between nations for centuries. Moves to
integrate and commonly recognise spatial data that defines borders between
countries are almost always controversial.
Mutual recognition and sharing of geographic information system (GIS)
spatial data sets between neighbouring countries would go a long way
towards providing a basis for resolving some border issues.
University of Melbourne geomatic engineers are working towards this vision
in United Nations efforts to achieve collaborative agreement on regional
administrative boundaries between scores of countries - a large number of
them in Australia's region.
"Significant gains would flow from greater collective responsibility in
many areas, including security, both in a military sense and from
perspectives such as sustainable development and human rights," says
Professor Ian Williamson, who heads a research group in Geomatics that has
taken a world lead in developing and applying new GIS technologies.
Professor Williamson says many countries are creating Spatial Data
Infrastructure (SDI) to better manage spatial information using a
perspective that proceeds through local, national and regional levels to a
global view.
A key part of Melbourne's contribution has been to develop new methods and
tools for collecting, disseminating, sharing and using spatial information.
Geomatics doctoral candidate Mr Abbas Rajabifard and Professor Williamson
recently completed a pilot trial for the United Nations-supported Permanent
Committee of GIS Infrastructure for Asia and the Pacific (PCGIAP), which
was set up to create a Regional SDI.
The project, which involves nine of the 55 PCGIAP countries, is part of Mr
Rajabifard's PhD. Mr Rajabifard is a geomatic engineer from Iran with five
years' experience in PCGIAP activities and the Global Mapping Project.
His project aimed at identifying and documenting, within a sample region,
problems and difficulties encountered when integrating administrative
boundary data from the pilot countries - Mongolia, China, India, Nepal,
Bhutan, South and North Korea, Japan and Sri Lanka.
Mr Rajabifard will present his 55-page report (backed by 50 pages of
specifications) to the seventh PCGIAP meeting in Japan tomorrow (24 April).
Professor Williamson says the Asia-Pacific region has seen the rapid growth
of regional cooperation focusing on promoting regional peace and stability;
mutual assistance on matters of common interest in the economic, social,
cultural, technical and administrative fields; training and research
support; more effective collaboration to improve the agricultural,
industrial, trading, transport and communication sectors, and cooperation
on ecological and environmental protection.
"Decision-makers need accurate and consistent spatial data to achieve these
goals," he says. "The principle is to share data, saving time, resources
and effort by avoiding duplication of the costs of creating and maintaining
national datasets, and integrating them with other data.
"While the boundaries pilot project has its own potential benefits -
including reduced tensions from mutually-agreed borders - its long term
value is as a demonstration study which will give us the rationale to
extend the concept into other fields."
After two years of initial work - including analysis of a regional
technical questionnaire which helped define specifications - Mr Rajabifard
spent six months piecing together ill-matched data that ranged from
state-of-the-art GIS information to traditional paper maps with widely
different projections systems. "Many boundaries don't align," he says.
"Some borders have discrepancies. It was like doing a jigsaw."
Mr Rajabifard sees the resulting regional fundamental data set prototype as
a significant first step. However, despite arrangements on privacy to meet
national security concerns, several nations have yet to provide data.
The big challenge is to gain access to more regional fundamental datasets
while respecting the national security and privacy rights of individual
nations, he says.
Further information is available at http://www.gsi.go.jp/PCGIAP


Brendan Whyte
Uni. Melbourne