Prudence Lawrence dedicates her time to sustainable development goals (SDG), responsible business practices, geospatial insights and advancements and data-driven decision-making and digital transformation.

Currently working as a Geospatial Manager at Australian Spatial Analytics, Ms Lawrence is an active participant in both Smart Cities committees (IT-268 and IT-269) as well as the Working Group for Digital Twin under IT-042. 

Ms Lawrence is involved with standards on an international level and has been commended multiple times for her work in City Information Modelling with the International Electrotechnical Commission’s (IEC) SyC Smart Cities committee.

When and why did you become involved with standards development?

I became involved with standards development in May 2019 when I was nominated by my employer to be a part of the Standards Australia Smart Cities Reference Group. 

At the time I was working on the development and proof-of-concept applications of 3D land administration data. This small piece of work was just a part of a  larger conversation that was happening within Australia and internationally in regard to cadastral modernisation and the digital twinning of land ownership and infrastructure assets. At the time I had also been awarded the Surveyor General International Fellowship and was travelling to Europe and South-east Asia to interview experts in the area of cadastral modernisation, as well as participate in geospatial and smart cities conferences and technical workshops. 2019 was very much a year spent drinking from a fire hose of data, geospatial and smart city technologies. My work with Standards Australia during that time allowed me to take a more holistic and high-level perspective to balance the more granular research and transformation work I was performing at other times.  

How do standards impact and interact with your industry?

It’s a mixed bag within the industry. You have areas of geospatial activities and technologies where standards and specifications are very important to everyday operations and data management, and then you have other datasets or areas where it is ad-hoc with very subjective modelling, structuring, and sharing. It really depends on the people at the helm and purpose of the data, from my experience. But I imagine this type of relationship with standards would be happening across industries that don’t have the mitigation of risk heavily embedded in their operations. Industries with high risk such as electrical installation, for example, see the benefits of standards and specification compliance in a far different way than other parts of industries that do not have exposure to those kind of risk profiles.

Communicating the benefit of standards when the disadvantages or risks are perhaps obscured is a little more difficult. My area of smart cities, sustainability and digital twins is associated with the risks of time, cost, resilience and innovation. For me the driver is to improve present efficiency and facilitate innovation, and a nice consequence that I see of those characteristics being addressed is the triple bottom line. Doing away with these legacy processes - duplication of effort and siloed converting of information (data) - and doing away with these inefficiencies of operation and mindset allows us to see new ways of utilising this precious and ever-increasing resource of rich data, and to use it to address the salient issues of our time.  

Why is access to standards important?

Standards allow for a shared understanding or language when we look to utilise data and manage pipelines of activities that rely on the communication of information across companies or industries. There are such great costs on time involved in trying to interpret data, trying to share data and the worst of them all - the recreation of existing data. Access to standards allows us to share a language within our industries and domains that facilitates efficiency in understanding and meaning. We often neglect that ‘understanding’ is not actually easy and straightforward, even among those who share the same native tongue. Standards can assist in building frameworks for understanding at a very basic level: the shared terminology of a domain area. At a higher level, standards help us to understand the syntax (composition or architecture) and application of the language, and that drives greater understanding between parties within an industry and when sharing data assets into a system of systems, such as those present in a functional smart city or digital twin.

What is the future of standardisation in your area of work?

I think that interest in adopting standards for areas such as digital twins and smart cities is growing, and I see geospatial data playing a key role in filtering and channelling data in meaningful ways. I see geospatial as an aggregator and a distributor of disparate data.

Currently I am involved with a specific working group looking to understand the current knowledge and usage of standards within our industry, specifically around digital twin applications. Preliminary results of a short survey show me that there is likely to be a knowledge gap of what constitutes a standard, despite there being adoption within the products and services being undertaken. Custodians and producers of data and data services may not distinguish what has been rubber-stamped as a ‘standard’. I believe unveiling the current standards being used in the industry will lead us forward in discussing how they have been of value.

We need to clarify the current standards in wide adoption and then we can uncover and adopt additional standards that assist in delivering geospatial as a horizontal technology that supports the architecture of smart cities and digital twins.

Over the last 100 years, individuals from technical, business, academic, government and community backgrounds have contributed their expertise to developing standards - helping make Australia a safer and more efficient country.

This month, we’re celebrating our Standards Awards heroes who have contributed their time to safety.

Read more about our standards heroes here, and our centenary here.

With the support of the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Standards Australia has begun a two-year program to boost capability for Critical and Emerging Technologies (CET) in South-East Asia.

The program began with a Community of Practice Virtual Workshop held on Tuesday 16th August. Attendees included participants from the 2021 CET Summit and Masterclasses who volunteered for Community of Practice in 2021 and South East Asian National Standards Body (NSB) representatives.

The interactive session detailed the CET program, and polled attendees on areas of interest and areas of training. The session allowed attendees to reconnect and build networking opportunities.

Find out more here.