WA maps out the future of land information

Landgate is the statutory authority responsible for the state of Western Australia’s land and property information. The digital and hard copy services it offers include a secure land titles system, a land and property information library, and land valuation services. To provide these services, Landgate collects geospatial data from surveys, aerial photographs and satellite imagery.

One of Landgate’s most significant challenges is the sheer size of the land mass for which it provides data. Landgate must provide not only land information for such a large land mass but also for very rural and remote areas. Establishing methods to support these customers requires both creativity and commitment.

“On a daily basis, more than 5000 state employees and members of the public made use of land information from 26 different government agencies,” said Andrew Burke, Landgate’s Executive Director Information Management.

So the goal was to develop a platform for sharing land information that would: simplify access to the government’s land and geographic information by providing online access using common infrastructure and services to link individual agency systems and data stores; provide a basis to improve the efficiency of the government’s business processes involving land and geographic information, particularly those that span several agencies and ‘bring to life’ the e-government strategy for Western Australia by building on the progress already made in drawing agencies closer together.

Landgate appointed IT management software company CA and the concept of a Shared Land Information Platform (SLIP) was developed. SLIP is designed specifically for the exchange of electronic information between Western Australian government agencies. It provides a virtual, single access point to authoritative spatial data, allowing agencies, citizens and customers to access land information online - anywhere and anytime - with the assurance that the information they see is the most current data available.

CA and Landgate engineered the SLIP Enabling Framework (SLIP-EF) to open up access to data stored on participating agency systems and to provide services that let applications directly access data.

CA’s design of SLIP-EF provides a single point of access for users to gain access to information distributed across many government agencies. It works as the central gateway through which all requests for information are channelled and directed to the custodial agency’s system for information retrieval.

One of the main concerns during the SLIP implementation was overcoming the security challenges of a multi-user environment while still ensuring increased delivery of information and services to customers.

Landgate chose two products from the CA Identity and Access Management portfolio to handle the authentication, authorisation and access management of anyone accessing the system.

Using CA’s eTrust SiteMinder and Identity Manager, Landgate has a central security infrastructure for managing user authentication and access as well as advanced security and site administration tools.

“One of the biggest attractions of SiteMinder was its single sign-on across multiple heterogeneous environments. This meant that Landgate users could move freely around the site without the need to re-enter passwords. This means a better end-user experience and reduced departmental overheads as administration time and expense is greatly reduced,” said Andrew Burke.