The Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping has laid out the four pillars of its new five-year 2025-2030 Strategy.

The ICSM’s Strategy aims to build “Surveying and Geospatial Foundations for a Thriving Future” by advancing trusted, interoperable and future-ready fundamentals.

The five-year Strategy is based upon four pillars, as follows:

Pillar 1: Excellent surveying and geospatial information. This involves:

• Supporting the modernisation and digitalisation of surveying and geospatial data infrastructure and supply chains across jurisdictions;
• Improving the quality, coverage, consistency and currency of surveying and foundation geospatial datasets; and
• Promoting Australia/New Zealand-consistent approaches to surveying and geospatial data delivery and APIs.

Pillar 2: Surveying and geospatial standards and frameworks. This comprises:

• Developing standards and frameworks to support interoperability across jurisdictions, platforms and applications;
• Collaboration on international and regional initiatives; and
• Promoting the adoption of open standards and accessible formats across the sector.

Pillar 3: Sector capability. Under this pillar, the ICSM will:

• Collaborate with industry and the education sector to grow interest in surveying and geospatial careers;
• Work to develop a diverse and future-ready workforce;
• Ensure First Nations’ consideration (with appropriate consultation) in the delivery of the ICSM’s objects and working group programs; and
• Encourage consistent capability frameworks and skills recognition across jurisdictions.

Pillar 4: Value for stakeholders. The fourth pillar will involve:

• Improving awareness of ICSM’s initiatives and outcomes;
• Affirming the recognition of the rights of First Nations people in ICSM activities;
• Delivering effective and efficient administrative governance of ICSM activities; and
• Advocating for broader adoption of geospatial standards for national and international policy agendas.

Trans-Tasman ICSM addressing initiative

According to the ICSM, its overall mission is twofold:

• To facilitate collaboration across jurisdictions to advance the measurement and modelling of land and water geospatial information; and
• To promote the standardisation and integration of surveying and foundational geospatial information.

In a post on LinkedIn, the body said that “As we look ahead, we are proud to recognise the significant contribution the ICSM’s working groups have made during the past five-year strategy period, to strengthen Australia and New Zealand’s geospatial foundations”.

The ICSM has pointed to the Addressing 2035 collaboration begun under the previous Strategy as an example of the work it is doing to progress its agenda.

As we reported back in August 2022, the Addressing 2035 plan defines a “vision and roadmap to deliver a dynamic and integrated whole-of-government addressing ecosystem, to enable service delivery and support a 3D and 4D digital economy”.

Research had shown that there were a large number of ‘pain points’ that needed addressing (no pun intended):

• Address supply chain issues were being caused by lack of guidance for applying current legislation and policy.
• Address assignment errors were being caused by a misunderstanding of the address assignment process and lack of stakeholder engagement.
• There was confusion in roles and responsibilities across the supply chain.
• The role of property developers in address creation was not clearly understood or consistently managed.
• There was a lack of adherence to, and inconsistent application of, existing addressing standards.
• The current spatial definitions of address sites did not match the real-world nature of these objects and were not suitable for future spatial digital twin models.
• Addresses were assigned late in the development cycle and after survey plan lodgement. This led to a reliance on lot numbers for the delivery of goods and services.
• There was no consistent method for representing addresses and sites within complex scenarios (e.g., private facilities such as universities) leading to inconsistent address allocation and no possible validation.
• Validation services only confirmed address validity using point-in-time data and not versions over time.
• Uptake and adoption of non-authoritative addresses (such as search engines and other technology providers) could conflict with the authoritative address.
• Citizens’ use of incorrect addresses when dealing with the public sector impacts service delivery and trust in the integrity of the underlying addressing system.
• There was no feedback mechanism to address points of truth for Government Agencies who encounter incorrect addresses.

At the time, the ICSM and ANZLIC said that the “common intent is for jurisdictions and all stakeholders involved in addressing across both countries, to converge on agreed courses of action that will improve addressing capability”.