The Singapore Geospatial Collaborative Environment “SG-SPACE” is the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) of Singapore. It was a national collaborative initiative–involving a total of 14 government agencies–to create and sustain an environment where geospatial data, policies and technologies are integrated to foster innovation, knowledge and value creation for the government, enterprises and the national community at large.

SG-SPACE, was primarily established to provide “a mechanism to make available the interoperable, organised and authoritative geospatial information” called for not only by national-level decision-makers and public security forces, but also by cost effective business owners and managers. At the same time, it was aimed at promoting location awareness among the citizens of Singapore.

With all these objectives in mind, CIO Chan Chin Wai and his team at the Singapore Land Authority (SLA), worked very closely with the many stakeholders in the multiagency effort, toward what they framed as the key business outcome of SG-SPACE: to turn Singapore into “’a spatially enabled nation,’ where geospatial information was readily available and used effectively by citizens and businesses for better decision making.” They then set about putting together SG-SPACE’s underlying IT infrastructure, called GeoSpace.

The Users Surveyed
A User Need Assessment Survey (UNA) was conducted in October 2008 by the SG-SPACE Technical Committee to poll all public agencies to assess the current situation on the supply, demand and sharing and applications of spatial data.

The survey revealed the following.

Many agencies faced difficulty in determining the source agency for data and if certain data is available and the lack of protocol for sharing spatial data. These placed limitations on the extent of benefits that could be reaped from the entire store of Geospatial Information available nationally on record.

Eighty-three percent of agencies indicated that they needed spatial data but only 35 percent of agencies were supported by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for spatial data management and analysis.
Seventy-seven percent of organisations collected address information from their customers as part of their operations. This indicated the wealth of potential spatial data to be created and the importance of location information in supporting government functions.

Forty percent of existing spatial data layers was available for sharing to other government agencies for use. However, due to the lack in information protocol, data sharing between agencies was mostly bilateral and the process of accessing data was less efficient than desirable.

Twenty-two percent of spatial data layers adopted recognised metadata standards. The remaining 81 percent adopted an array of different standards or did not create or maintain metadata at all. The absence of metadata or non-standardised metadata made it difficult for data to be searched, discovered and used

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