Landgate, the Statutory Authority responsible for Western Australia’s land and property information, maintains the state’s official regis­ter of land ownership and survey information and is responsible for valuing its land and property for government interest. Having as core business land and property information, Landgate has developed the Shared Land Information Platform (SLIP) which forms the foundation for an information connection service. This allows the development of cross-government solutions to meet specific information needs. SLIP is a Western Australian success story, with nineteen government agencies connected to provide real-time access to land information.

Technology Heart
SLIP can be seen as representing one of the key building blocks in the Global Land Management Paradigm introduced by Prof. Stig Enemark and co-workers in 2005. The broader Western Australian political and social context has provided the local drivers and conditions that have allowed the concept of inter-agency collabor­ation and a sharing paradigm to take root. The SLIP Enabler, the ‘technology heart’ of SLIP, provides an infrastructure and suite of services that enables efficient and flexible access to the government’s significant land and geographic information resources. The Enabler provides innovative technical solutions to deliver business outcomes supporting four business areas: land information markets, land use and development and emergency response management.

Maximum Reuse
The SLIP Enabler’s Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach reduces duplication of datasets, allows agencies to retain full control of their data, and ensures the most current spatial information is available to systems and users. The architecture is consistent with the OpenGIS Reference Model (ORM) and extends it to introduce capabilities to deal with security, which is an important consideration within the context of SLIP. The architecture enables maximum reuse of components, and pos­itions SLIP for integration with other services.

Single Point
SLIP infrastructure installed at an agency site interfaces directly with the organ­isation’s spatial data store, providing services that implement the OpenGIS® Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standards and inter-operate with the central WMS and WFS services located at Landgate. This provides users and applications with a single point of access to spatial data from all agencies. OGC standards are implemented in more than two hundred vector, and a thousand raster services.

Business and Citizens
Landgate is looking to roll out services that implement the OpenGIS Web Mapping Service–Coverages (WMS-C) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standards, the KML Encoding Standard, and a transactional WFS (WFS-T). SLIP has been hailed as a world leader in overcoming the challenges of traditional government models by promoting shared outcomes while maintaining agency accountability. In an era when the business of land information is rapidly expanding, SLIP shows great promise for governments, both at state and national level. SLIP is about rationalising the continued development of disparate systems and opening up access to the wealth of land information. It delivers a whole-of-government Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), and state investment in this infrastructure will support future business applications, spatially enabling Western Australian businesses and citizens.