The establishment of a Spatial Information Infrastructure with its associated specification of standards, responsibilities associated with information management will assist in maximising our investment in this vital resource. The Price Waterhouse Benefit Study also showed that the existing infrastructure for supplying spatial data has provided information to users at a cost far lower than alternative methods. If the existing infrastructure had not been in place and users had been forced to meet their data requirements from other sources, their costs would have been approximately six times higher. In recent times, national competition policies in Australia and New Zealand have reinforced the concept of a single, consistent, accessible, government funded information infrastructure as a basis for developing a competitive private sector and facilitating value-adding services. There are several examples of data infrastructure being developed in a national context in Australia and New Zealand by a number of different means.
Programs conducted by the National government include statistics, oceanography and climate.
For example, in April 1994 the President United States of America issued an Executive Order which implemented a national spatial data infrastructure. The European Community has developed detailed policies and strategies for a European Geographic Information Infrastructure. Similar steps are being taken in South Korea, Japan, Indonesia and other countries in our region. In October 1996, the Permanent Committee for GIS Infrastructure for Asia and the Pacific held its inaugural plenary meeting in Sydney to address the needs and strategies for a regional spatial data infrastructure. There are certain emerging national user needs which require a consistent dataset across the nation, based on the integration of jurisdiction datasets.