A geospatial approach to managing public housing on superlots

Abstract

This paper outlines how an object-oriented geospatial approach to Australian public housing management may help solve a core problem currently faced by the NSW Department of Housing (DoH) - locating individual tenancies within large, unconsolidated cadastral units, or Superlots. The concentration of high-rise housing built upon these lots has exposed the limitations of the standard cadastral data structures and two-dimensional systems currently in use within the DoH. In this paper, we explore the capacity for Building Information Models (BIMs) based on Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) to create semantically rich, yet minimal, representations of individual buildings and tenancies located within the Superlot. This schema provides a methodology to move beyond the ubiquitous land parcel with a visualisation system that spans from a broad, urban scale to that of an individual building within a Superlot, and progressively into the individual tenancies. This forms the underlying structure for our Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) to perform operations ranging from simple queries to more advanced analysis and decision support for Public Housing areas.