NEWS
Dr. Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse, Vice President of the ISDE, was recently interviewed by Position magazine, Australia's leading publication for the surveying and spatial sciences sector. The interview appears in a special issue for the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) Working Week 2025 and Locate25 in April 2025 in Brisbane, Australia.
Position magazine is the only independent publication serving the surveying and spatial science community across Australasia. As the official magazine of the Geospatial Council of Australia (GCA), it is published bi-monthly in both print and digital formats, delivering six comprehensive issues annually.
Read the full interview below.
Over the past several months, Mohamed-Ghouse has attended a range of important international meetings that have discussed matters of great significance for all disciplines within the geospatial sector and in all corners of the globe. In this wide-ranging interview, we caught up with him to seek out his views on some of the latest trends and topics being deliberated in the worldwide community.
Please tell us about the UN-GGIM meeting in Mexico.
The UN-GGIM holds a World Geospatial Information Congress once every four years, and midway in between is the High-Level Forum. The High-Level Forum in Mexico, which had climate change as its central theme, attracted government ministers from a range of countries — including the Prime Minister of one of the Pacific Island countries — to talk about the importance of geospatial data and its role in climate change.
I led a panel on the concept of the geospatial ecosystem beyond spatial data infrastructure. This session was hosted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Chair of the UN-GGIM Arab states, along with a Minister from South Africa. The session covered the need of the geospatial ecosystems to move beyond the UN Sustainable Development Initiatives (SDI) in order to be inclusive by having shared infrastructure for developing countries, so that they can participate and have a high level of maturity in making decisions through the ecosystem approach.
The UN-GGIM has taken a very serious view about the future of the geospatial information ecosystem because it presents an opportunity for all countries to participate and make quick decisions without having to set up the whole geospatial life cycle process.
I'm one of the contributors of a paper on the geospatial ecosystem beyond SDIs. We met for 52 sessions, each three hours, during COVID, and all these authors came to the meeting with great passion to talk about the paper. Because the SDIs have matured, we need to look beyond them, and that's what has evolved into this concept.
This concept has been implemented in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is called the Saudi Arabian National Geospatial Ecosystem, and the OGC has been heavily involved. And in fact, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has put a proposal to the United Nations to establish a Geospatial Information Ecosystem Centre of Excellence.
So, you see how the transformation is happening and how the community is embracing it. I'm very proud to be an advocate for this concept of the geospatial ecosystem.
All of this proposed change needs the right people, of course.
Yes, and another concept discussed at the High-Level Forum was the next generation of leadership and how we attract them to the profession. Young scientists from different parts of the world came along to talk about their role in developing the geospatial ecosystem.
Another important topic at the High-Level Forum was the empowerment of women, and indeed the Forum was led by Paloma Merodio Gómez, a [now former] co-chair of the UN-GGIM. There was a women-only panel at the start of the Forum which brought in academia, the private sector and government to talk about how we can work together to strengthen the UN-GGIM global agenda.
You mentioned the Pacific Islands and climate change. This is life or death for them, isn't it?
Exactly, and this is where evidence-based geospatial information is very critical in order to plan and prepare for sea level rise, floods etc. Sea level rise is real, and it is impacting lives now. I recall a comment from Viliami Folou, the geospatial leader from Tonga and a person very active in the UN-GGIM special community. He mentioned in the closing of the Forum that storms and floods are not new to Pacific Island countries, but the frequency and the intensity is. It is so frequent that, by the time you mitigate one, the next one arrives. It pains to lose loved ones in these scenarios.
We really need critical, accurate, high-quality geospatial information for policymakers to make important decisions around how we can sustain this planet. We all have an obligation to really look at how to save lives. Everyone comes in to contribute when there are disasters, but people do not have the same proactive attention span when it comes to how to manage disasters pre-event.
There was a heavy participation of Pacific Island countries at the Forum, including a delegation of young professionals from Tonga, and from Fiji as well. The island countries were very well represented at the forum in New Delhi, too.
Tell us about that UN-GGIM Asia Pacific meeting in New Delhi.
I chaired several panels, and one of them was about capacity building in land administration through the support of private sector — what’s the role of private sector in order to develop the modernisation of cadastre, especially capacity building? That session really attracted a lot of attention from the member states.
We also spoke about implementation of the UN Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (UN-IGIF), which brings in a common operating model or a framework of how countries should develop their country level action plans for geospatial. I had the opportunity to lead that panel discussion with academia, the private sector and government around the specific roles that they can play in strengthening the IGIF implementation. It was very good session.
Information means data. Is data being made available equitably?
The sharing of data is very important, but there are still barriers we need to break — intergovernmental, inter-ministerial, and also across overseas governments. It brings great value to have a proactive nature of sharing data. Where data is not shared — and we totally understand when it's for security purposes — it becomes a barrier because time is of the essence, especially when saving lives. You don't have time to do the data conflation — we often have to depend on poor-quality data.
So this is why the nature of open data and the ability to share data which is not sensitive, is really, really necessary. We have to make a provision for 'sensitive' and 'non-sensitive' data; currently there is no clarity, it's subject to interpretation. There are certain mechanisms, but we don't have a global mechanism in order to derive that.
I think that's one outcome that we can look forward to; making sure that high-quality data is made available and it's proactive so that we can plan. In Australia, when summer comes, we plan for fire events — the governments reinforce to citizens that a hot day is going to come, so please practise all the safety measures. This happens very well in Western countries, but not in the developing or underdeveloped countries; that's where it's very, very difficult.
But I should say that the Earth observation community — all the satellite providers, irrespective of private or government — in the event of a disaster, will point at that particular place in order to provide data to first responders. But satellite data alone is not enough; we need other data to save lives.
Do digital twins have a role to play here?
This is a very important topic. People think a digital twin is a 3D representation of the Earth, but it's not just about geospatial. The power comes when you add the attributes, the real time information. It's a good mechanism for governing urban areas, but also now we have digital twins on farms where robots are trained to go and pick fruit. It's about managing assets, and geospatial is only one component of the digital twin.
The power of a digital twin is to utilise it as a platform for making decisions. In order to make that happen we need to integrate the digital twin with real time sensors, with demographic information, with asset information. This will make it a powerful decision-making tool in order to govern cities, deal with climate change, heat waves and so on.
What about the importance of open data?
I had the opportunity to attend the 30th anniversary celebration of the OGC in Washington, DC, and it was great to see the co-founder, David Schell, recognised with the Lifetime Achievement Award. I had the opportunity to ask him where he thinks the OGC has come over the last 30 years. He replied that interoperability was one of the agendas of the OGC when it started, and which attracted private sector, government and academia as contributors.
But the OGC has evolved into a community of practise that brings in professionals to not only talk about the data and standards, but to talk about issues that are common, and which can be resolved collectively — it's not just any one person's problem anymore.
The way this has been articulated through the 30 years of its existence is a testament to how the OGC has great listening skills and tries to collaborate with the community to find answers. And whatever answers are found, are transmitted globally.
Do you see any other important global trends?
I think the pace of the integration of space and geospatial is exponential. There are more and more Earth observation data captured through different platforms and means, such as cube satellites. And more venture capitalist investing in start-ups, and more sensor integration, which you can see coming from entrepreneurs from all over the world. One example is satellite on-board data processing of geospatial information before it is transmitted back to Earth.
Security is another thing that concerns us. We all are dedicating ourselves to create the veracity of geospatial data from Earth observation, but we do not concentrate on cyber security threats.
Another topic is PNT as critical infrastructure. In my view, we still have a lot of work to do to make governments understand that geospatial is just as critical roads, railways, electricity, water pipelines and so on.
Finally, you must be excited that the combined FIG/Locate event is about to kick off in Brisbane?
Yes, definitely. When I was the president of the SSSI (now GCA), I led the bid for this Brisbane FIG Working Week event. It's good to see that this conference is coming again to our shores so that we can re-engage.
I strongly believe in bringing partnership events, international events, to Australia. By having these sorts of collaborations, the world can come to Australia and see the work we have done — very pioneering work, be it the Digital Earth Australia initiative, the modernisation of cadastre, or digital twins.
Because of our remoteness, we aren't able to travel to a lot of these conferences. Yet while we have very small community, we work very significantly and contribute to the global agenda.
These sorts of international partnerships and events are also ways of communicating to the next generation of emerging geospatial leaders and professionals about how Australia links itself to the global community.
View the original interview transcript here:
https://www.spatialsource.com.au/?p=43274
