Posted by Davina Jackson on 23 Aug 2014
New geospatial 'special interest groups' (SIGs) are being launched by several Australian industry organisations.
—Simulation Australia, generally promoting simulation expertise relevant to the defence, aerospace, transport and health sectors, will this week launch a new SIG for architecture and urbanism. It is intended to attract building and city modelling experts who have not got a critical mass at existing professional institutes for architecture and urban planning. Engineers Australia
Read More
A Swiss simulations expert has demonstrated to Australian urban researchers a futuristic 'city lab' for testing urban strategies by manipulating and watching dynamic virtual models.
Dr Bernhard Klein, a leader of the Simulation Platform research team at ETH-Zurich's Future Cities Lab (FCL) in Singapore, showed advanced urban modelling presentation systems at this week's launch of Simulation Australia's new architecture and urbanism simulations group.
He demonstrated various uses of Read More
After almost a decade of resistance to 'data cities' advances by many built environment and research leaders, Australia's first significant public workshop on digital urban modelling systems is being organised by Simulation Australia.
Sim AU's Architecture and Urban Planning Think-Tank will introduce Australian specialists to latest simulation research thrusts at ETH-Zurich's Future Cities Lab – following the sale of FCL's ground-breaking procedural modelling software to Californian GIS 
Australia's Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has launched the beta of a new open access 'National Map' of Australia. His announcement yesterday (9 July 2014) is here.
The 'National Map Open Data Initiative' (NM) has been organised by his department's spatial policy group to proof of concept stage, with geospatial experts from NICTA, Geoscience Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology and other government agencies. It follows Geoscience Australia's digital geological map launched ('as a 
Less than three years after launching the Virtual Australia and New Zealand (VANZ) vision for geodata modelling of both nations' environments, Australia's Government is backing away from the concept.
Claimed to be the world's first 'Virtual Nations' project, VANZ logically is the antipodean subset of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS, aka Digital Earth) movement to harness online data to monitor, model and manage the world's resources.
The VANZ vision has been exploited 
Professional trainers who use simulations need to be able to exchange their different experiences with a common language.
That's the view of professional development leaders at Simulation Australia, a national group focused on the productivity potentials of simulating situations and scenarios.
They have begun a project to improve crossflows between simulation professionals across different industries and disciplines.
Called Babel Fish (formerly Rosetta Stone), the project is being