The GI Strategy for Northern
Ireland has now been branded as Mosaic, and is being progressed by the Department of Culture, Arts &
Leisure (DCAL) through OSNI. Mosaic was formally launched by the Minister for DCAL at the Association for Geographic Information
Northern Ireland 2004 Conference.
A Mosaic Support
Office has been established to carry out a range of activities in the areas of representation, co-ordination,
consultation, administration, communication and technical support.
Funding
from the e-Government Fund will continue to support the development of Internet-based GI pilot portal
projects, including:
- Mosaic website;
- Land
and Property Information portal;
- Environmental Information portal;
- Placenames
portal; and
- Key Datasets Portal.
In
addition, the EU’s Interreg IIIa Fund has allowed the establishment of the Mosaic Spatial Indicators
Project. The main aim of this project is to create a local centre of excellence to encourage and assist government
departments and state-funded bodies in Northern Ireland and the Border Region to utilise the data and
applications created by MOLAND (Monitoring Land Cover/Use Dynamics). MOLAND has defined and validated a methodology in support of European sectoral policies with territorial and
environmental impacts for endorsing sustainable urban and regional development. To this end, MOLAND develops land use digital databases at different dates, to provide an assessment
of land use changes over time.
The Mosaic Support
Office has also been drafting a formal implementation strategy document over the last few months that
builds on the original consultation document for the Northern Ireland Geographic Information Strategy,
and will detail how Mosaic will be implemented over the next year and beyond.
A
vision of Mosaic is that every Public Servant should be able to access the appropriate (geographic)
information in order to facilitate policy development and evaluation, administration and service delivery,
at the desktop, in a seamless way. Furthermore, the public should be able to view Government held information in an easy-to-understand
way.
Key to achieving the implementation of this
vision will be the development of a GI Hub for Northern Ireland. This Hub will provide the technical and organisational infrastructure to make Government held Geographic
Information accessible and usable, by providing a basic mapping capability to government departments
with no existing Geographical Information System resources. The GI Hub is (subject to business case approval) expected to ‘go live’ by the Summer of 2006.
