Planning and Land Use Services, SA Government
Flood-plain survey data arrived from many contractors in many formats, and nobody could point to the single reliable copy.
The problem
PLUS monitors flood plains statewide to support planning decisions. Contractors supplied survey data in proprietary formats. It was duplicated across applications and storage, on-premises and in the cloud. There was no single source of truth, and onboarding a new dataset was a project in itself.
What we did
Worked jointly with AWS. Proved the riskiest part first: running the GDAL geospatial library serverless, so proprietary formats could be translated and compressed files queried in place. Built a data-driven ingestion pipeline where a new dataset is onboarded by adding a single record. Converted raw formats into open, standardised ones that analysts query directly. Put the whole platform under infrastructure as code and CI/CD, in line with PLUS's own practice.
What's simpler now
- One governed source of geospatial truth.
- Quality checks that give early feedback.
- Faster, cheaper queries.
- Single sign-on with row- and column-level access control and tamper-proof audit trails.
- New datasets in hours, not weeks.