The first moves toward a fully integrated national spatial data infrastructure in Indonesia have been taken. A tender will likely be released in October asking for expressions of interest in building the system.
The project is due for completion in 2013.
Speaking on the sidelines of the 2009 South East Asian Survey Congress (SEASC, 3-7 August) in Bali, M Arief Syafi'í - the head of the networking development division of the Indonesian land agency, Bakosurtanal - said the project had three elements: data acquisition over Sumatera, an SDI networking system and an applications development system.
The first of these, which includes the re-mapping of 70 per cent of Sumatera, has sparked much interest among suppliers of radar data. It is generally assumed that radar is the only practical way of mapping the cloud-covered island in a reasonable timeframe.
A contract to map the rest of the country to the same standard will be released once the Sumatera data is processed and in use.
The SDI networking system includes all the hardware, software and communications infrastructure required to link Bakosurtanal, the National Land Agency and eleven other agencies in the Indonesian government.
However, many applications will be used by local and regional government. Arief said that training local government officers to use the flood of information that will shortly be available is a high priority.
