MALAYSIAN GOVT WORKS ON POLICY AND FRAMEWORK TO IMPROVE GEOSPATIAL DATA MANAGEMENT

KUALA LUMPUR, July 26 (Bernama) -- The Malaysian government is working on a
definite policy and legal framework to improve geospatial data management in the
country, says Minister of Natural Resources and Environment, Douglas Unggah
Embas.

He said the policy and legal framework are important to determine the basic
principals and responsibilities of federal, state and local authorities.

"It is also important in providing a mechanism for comprehensive and
organised geospatial data dissemination.

"We need to focus on effective planning and implementation to achieve
Malaysia's goal of having a spatially enabled government and spatially
enabled society," he said in his speech at the launch of the MAP Asia 2010 and
the International Symposium and Exhibition on Geoinformation 2010 here Monday.

Geospatial data management refers to data that is geographic and spatial in
nature.

According to Douglas, the proposed legal framework would basically be guided
by two main aspects.

The first, he said, refers to factors that promote and improve data
availability to the users, in terms of access, usage and sharing.

"The second aspect concerns those factors that hinder its availability and
involves issues related to privacy, liability and intellectual property.

"The coordination to balance these two factors is very important in ensuring
geospatial data development in the country is not hampered.

"The formulation of this policy and legal framework will be given priority
with the focus on data security and confidentiality, custodianship, data
sharing, data integration, data dissemination and standards," he added.

He also highlighted that at present, there was increasing use of the
geographic information systems (GIS), at local government levels but with too
many organisations and people working on the same tasks, the repetition was
higher.

"We definitely need to develop "connected" systems that can remove such
redundancy.

"Having connections in a ubiquitous environment vis-a-vis public service
delivery mechanism, should be the focus of the community, comprising developers
and users who have assembled here today," he explained.

Douglas said that despite being fairly new, the implementation of geospatial
data infrastructure (GDI) in the country, is pretty much in balance with other
developed countries.

"Even in terms of activities and implementation programmes, I must say that,
we are on the right track and approaching close to our initial goals.

"However, more effort is required to encourage data sharing, not only
among government agencies but the private sector as well," he added.

--BERNAMA