Senior Minister of State for Sustainability and Environment and Senior Minister of State for Transport, Ms Amy Khor,

Chief Executive for Singapore Land Authority, Mr Colin Low,

CEO of Open Geospatial Consortium, Dr. Nadine Alameh

Distinguished guests, colleagues, and guests.

1. Firstly, I would like to thank the Singapore Land Authority for inviting me to deliver the opening remarks at the Singapore Geospatial Festival 2022 and 124^th OGC Member Meeting. To our overseas delegates, a very warm welcome to Singapore, and I hope you will be able to spend some time to explore our beautiful city.

2. The integration of land and sea as mentioned by Chief Executive of The Singapore Land Authority, Mr Colin Low, is critical in the fight against global issues such as climate change. Singapore has continually demonstrated to the international community the importance of this integration effort, with both SLA and MPA making a commitment to work towards actively overcoming the various obstacles involved in the integration.

Innovation

3. The Maritime and Port Authority, MPA, similarly supports the efforts through spurring innovation amongst the public by enabling access to Marine Geospatial Datasets. GeoSpace-Sea, Singapore’s National Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure, is now accessible to all, and we invite all the various expertise present at the festival and meetings to explore the datasets and share with us your ideas.

4. MPA recognizes the value of making these marine and maritime geospatial data FAIR - findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. I am happy to announce that 27 datasets are now available on the website. We are also working hard with government-industry-academic stakeholders to progressively make more of such marine and maritime datasets available. There will be an additional 11 datasets to be made available by the end of October and others including marine science datasets by Q2 of 2023. We hope that with more open access to these marine and maritime datasets, the international community will also be able to actively visualise, innovate and integrate these datasets. Further pushing the boundaries of the utilisation and insights that can be derived from these datasets and APIs.

Partnerships and Collaborations

5. With climate change, sea-level rise and food security issues on the rise, there is an increasing need to use technology to study and proactively manage the long term and short-term effects of these environmental changes. This will enable Singapore to design proactive and pre-emptive measures to successfully mitigate or reduce the resultant impacts. To capitalise on the technology advancements, MPA has been actively enhancing linkages and increasing collaborative efforts with Institute of Higher Learnings, Industrial partners and International Bodies. There are two initiatives we are looking forward to in the year ahead.

Research collaboration with Technology Centre for Offshore and Marine Singapore (TCOMS)

6. MPA will be embarking on a research collaboration with Technology Centre for Offshore and Marine Singapore, in short TCOMS, to develop a marine digital twin with AI capability to better understand the regional wind and currents in influencing the Singapore’s hydrodynamic environment. This will further our efforts to build local capacity and tap on local academic and research capabilities.

OGC-IHO-ISO Federated Marine Spatial Data Infrastructures Project Phase V

7. The ability to integrate land and marine data will better support decision making for coastal and port infrastructure planning and development. MPA is excited to partner SLA and OGC on a pilot to develop open standards for integrating various types of land and marine data and application prototypes based on those standards, including digital twin technologies.
8. To further reinforce MPA international efforts on effective partnerships and collaborations to drive technology development to combat climate change impacts, MPA will also pledge its support for the OGC Federated Marine Spatial Data Infrastructures Project.
9.  With existing data acquisition, sharing and conversion gaps that are presently faced between the land and sea, MPA will like to show its commitment towards integrated spatial planning by supporting the project through various monetary, human, and technological efforts. We hope that an innovative pilot project on digital twin for Land and Sea in the context of Singapore can spur further ideas and enable others to implement open standards for the inter-model integration between domains. 

Conclusion

10. I hope that you have gained some insights on the importance of cooperation and collaboration for us to continuously push for innovation in both marine and land geospatial information. MPA has and will continue to show its commitment and support towards such efforts to cultivate the change we want to see by pushing the boundaries of open standards and the integration between land and sea. I look forward to hearing your insights over the next few days at GeoFest as well. 

11. Thank you.