PSMA defends data quality after NBNCo criticism

PSMA Australia Limited, a company that produces spatial information using government sources, has defended the quality of its products in the face of criticism from NBNCo CEO Mike Quigley.

Quigley yesterday singled out the poor quality of spatial data as one of the things that has slowed NBNCo’s efforts. During the launch of NBNCo’s new corporate plan, Quigley said PSMA’s Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF) product and other cadastral information had proved inaccurate, which had slowed planning for the network.

“I cannot overestimate the large scale job of getting all these databases aligned,” Quigley told the launch. “We really had to do a lot of processing.”

PSMA CEO Dan Paull has hit back at those statements, defending the quality and accuracy of G-NAF and adding that NBNCo has not as yet acquired spatial data sets he feels are better suited to the planning of the network.

“I think that what NBNCo realised is that G-NAF does not meet all their requirements for detailed design. But G-NAF was not sold as that. PSMA offers a range of other data sets better suited to that task and NBNCo did not buy them.”

Paull said he is not aware whether NBNCo acquire similar data sets from other sources, but added that PSMA has had ongoing discussions with NBNCo about the kind of data it needs to plan the network.

“I have had discussions with Mike Quigley and other NBNco executive about the geographic information that would assist them,” he said, adding that it is “Reasonable for Mike Quigley to say this is a very challenging process. It is not like you can go to a vendor and meet these [NBNCo’s] requirements because this has not been done before.”

Paull also said that PSMA is working on a new release of G-NAF that will include changes in “near real-time” and said that product, expected to be released in early 2013, will be a world’s first for any national spatial data service.

“We’ve offered it to NBNCo and hope it makes a difference to the way they operate,” Paull said. ®