Dan Paull, front row second from left, receiving PSMA Australia’s AIIA award for business services innovation.
This year’s AIIA awards have seen spatial technologies shine with a host of awards receiving state recognition and entry to the national stage. The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) awards recognise innovation in the digital economy across Australia.
Spatial dataset provider PSMA Australia have once again received praise for their ambitious Geoscape initiative. Representing the Australian Capital Territory, PSMA were hailed as Business Services award winner for its method forcomprehensively capturing Australia’s built environment to provide better understanding of what exists at an address. For every address in Australia, Geoscape will map all building footprints and heights, land cover, tree heights, rooftop materials, swimming pools and solar panels across Australia’s 7.6 million square kilometre land mass.
Spatial innovation was further recognised at AIIA South Australia when University of South Australia took out the Consumer award for its LiPo indoor positioning system. LiPo uses simple hardware and visible light to create accurate, low cost and energy efficient indoor positioning with an average positioning error of less than 0.06 m.
South Australia continued to shine when Primary Industries & Regions SA won the ‘South Australian Premier’s iAward for Public Sector Innovation’ for AgInsight South Australia. The AgInsight information portal is the nation’s first interactive, multi-platform, cloud-hosted web application to provide users from across the world with comprehensive agricultural and economic data bundled with powerful mapping functionality.
The award winners will go on to represent their states in the national AIIA awards in September.
PSMA have garnered a lot of attention in 2016 due to their open data release of its G-NAF national address dataset, as well as the announcement of Geoscape in April this year. PSMA also received international praise for Geoscape in May when awarded a Geospatial World Excellence Award at the Geospatial World Forum.
In receiving the award for AIIA award for Business Services, PSMA Australia’s CEO Dan Paull commented on the significance of Geoscape:
“It is extraordinary to think that in the data-rich world that we live, we don’t have an understanding of the built environment such that we know where all the building in the country are! But we don’t. And because this information hasn’t been available, the data gap is filled by assumption, extrapolation and educated guess-work,” he said.
“The beauty of Geoscape is that as an analytics covering the whole country, it can be used by a wide range of industries and government to fill the gap, remove the uncertainty and extend the quality of analysis that was previously available.
“One of the more powerful use cases is the insurance market where there is increased capacity to understand and manage risk associated with built infrastructure.”
PSMA have performed Geoscape for much of Adelaide and in isolated parts of Australia’s capital cities. To learn more, visit PSMA Australia’s website.
