Bill Simpson-Young
Director, Engineering and Technology Development
National ICT Australia (NICTA)
Australia

Biography
Bill is Director of Engineering and Technology Development at NICTA. In this role, he is leading a group of engineers to build globally competitive technology from NICTA’s research to help NICTA achieve its objective of wealth creation for national benefit. Prior to joining NICTA he was General Manager of Division with over 40 R&D staff at CiSRA (Canon Information Systems Research Australia, Canon’s Australian R&D subsidiary). Bill has over 20 years experience in ICT R&D including as a software engineer, research scientist and in R&D management. He has worked in R&D for global technology companies (Canon and Unisys), in government-funded research institutions (CSIRO and NICTA) and worked in research and teaching in university (University of Sydney). His area of speciality is in leading R&D teams to develop technology with a strong technological competitive advantage and so to bridge from research into competitive technology ready for commercialisation. Bill’s experience includes leading research and development teams to deliver advanced research into global products being used by over 100 million consumers and professionals. He has contributed to international standards and holds many international patents in areas covering internet and video technologies. He also developed and teaches a Masters course at the University of Sydney on “Understanding IT Innovations”.

Abstract
Open Spatial Data Platform for Visualisation and Analytics of Geospatial Data

NICTA (Australia’s Centre of Excellence in Information and Communication Technology) has developed a software platform for web-based access to spatial data. This software is being used in the Australian government’s National Map service and provides easy web-based viewing of a wide range of spatial data directly from data custodians. The National Map service provides access to thousands of datasets published by government agencies including water and agricultural resources, transport, infrastructure, social and economic statistics, and natural disaster risk assessments. The NICTA software platform uses Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard protocols and allows the flexibility to create and share custom maps drawing on data served by a wide range of different vendor’s GIS systems. The platform builds on the open source Cesium 3D geospatial browsing software, which NICTA co-develops with the rest of the Cesium software development community. In this presentation, I will describe the system architecture, demonstrate applications using it (including applications for national spatial data access, groundwater modeling and spatial data analytics) and talk about future plans for the software platform.