Foreword

Topographic information shows the natural and man-made features of the land represented to scale, and is familiar to us all on maps.

Used by the emergency services in life-or-death situations such as disaster response, topographic information is also involved in every-day processes such as land management and defence planning. It is, in fact, an everyday necessity for understanding our country and its assets, and so for supporting economic development.

Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) and our predecessors have been responsible for national topographic mapping in New Zealand for over a hundred years.

For well over a decade, digital techniques have been used to enhance efficient generation and publication of paper topographic maps. Our digital topographic data now form a vast resource that is one of the most useful strands in the fabric of the information revolution.

New technologies manipulating digital topographic information are producing exciting new applications: some of these are already used in emergency control centres, navigation systems and mobile devices, while others are still over the horizon.

The need for a strategy

Our responsibility is to ensure that the nation's topographic information infrastructure will continue to be capable of serving society's changing needs. During recent consultations with our primary customers and other industry participants, we were told that they want a more predictable industry environment, in which to make essential long-term financial, technology and human resource decisions.

In publishing this Topographic Information Strategy now, with a clear indication of LINZ's direction, our intention is to contribute to the establishment of a more predictable industry environment. However, we recognise that there will still be many unknowns in an industry so characterised by rapid technological advance and changing customer needs.

We have developed this Strategy with considerable input from our primary customers and others, and we express our thanks for their goodwill and participation.

Success factors

In addition to meeting our primary customers' requirements and signposting our strategic direction as clearly as possible, a successful strategy will need to:

• be flexible to accommodate the changing environment.
• support New Zealand's e-Government strategies to become an information and knowledge-based society.
• support LINZ's overall strategic direction and outcomes.
• recognise the key role of topographic data in providing the geospatial framework for a myriad of applications and uses.

Brendan Boyle
Chief Executive, Land Information New Zealand