Location Information delivered as a commoditised service for Western Australia

Darren Mottolini

Landgate

SLIP is taking ‘GIS’ out of the experts and into the hands of the community.

Landgate embarked on a transformative program in 2012 to change how Location Information was delivered to the Western Australian audience. This program is built on the lessons learnt through the original Shared Location Information Platform (SLIP) which was delivered in 2007 as asingle point of access the widest range of location information.

New SLIP was launched in September 2014 and is a pure ‘platform as a service’ for Western Australia, managed by Landgate on behalf of agency partners across government. The service is now attracting close to half a million map sessions per month. Since the launch of the new SLIP, there has been a significant uptake in usage across both the public and private sectors, primarily driven by non-technical users that have, for the first time, been able to access a massive store of location information through a single, non-technical platform – Google Maps and Earth.

The increased use of the service is now driving increased demands for access to further information from across government and other sources. This is generating benefits across sectors beyond the spatial industry. Location information is now being packaged and delivered as a commodity to business users and the community, revealing new insights into the demands for location-based information across the broader community.

This presentation will look at:

  • The use of cloud infrastructure as a shared resource across multiple partner agencies and its benefits to service provision to the WA Community;
  • How the value of location information is changing the mindset of users and their expectations of availability;
  • The potential for new research, service and delivery of location information into wide and varied systems and applications.

Landgate is now looking at how new SLIP is placed within the WA context as a key information service that can simplify the process of information gathering and use across many sectors.

The commoditisation of location information through new SLIP has moved low value, highly repetitive tasks from the hands of experts into the hands of anyone. This has in turned increased the number of value add-on services and solutions now being available for anyone to connect into and utilise location information in new and exciting ways.