Prof Abbas Rajabifard

Professor Abbas Rajabifard is Director of the Centre for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Land Administration at the Department of Infrastructure Engineering, the University of Melbourne. He is the immidiate Past President of the GSDI Association, and was Vice Chair of Working Group 3 of the United Nations supported Permanent Committee on GIS Infrastructure for Asia and the Pacific (PCGIAP) a member of ICA-Spatial Data Standard Commission, and a member of Victorian Spatial Council. He has been an Executive Board member and national representative to the PCGIAP (1994-1998), member of International Steering Committee for Global Mapping Project (1997-2001) and a member of the UN-ESCAP Group of Experts to develop Guidelines on GIS Standardisation for Asia-Pacific (1995).

He had published broadly on SDI, land administration, spatial enablemnt and spatial data management. In recent years he has focused more on the design and development of SDIs in different jurisdictions including spatially enabled platform and virtual jurisdictions including Virtual Australia. He provide academic and research leadership in the Centre for SDIs and Land Administration; coordinate research activities of the PCGIAP-Working Group 3 (Spatially Enabled Government) benchmarking worldwide cadastral systems, marine SDI and marine administration and currently working on projects including natural and built environment data integration as part of National SDI and development of a Seamless SDI model.

Professor Rajabifard has over 15 years of teaching experience in different areas of the spatial data disciplines and in particular on SDI, land administration and GIS. He has supervised many successful PhD and Masters students and has assessed PhD and MSc thesis internationally. In addition to his personal research, a key focus of his effort has been to build the research capacity across different disciplines. In this area, he has successfully managed and coordinated different research projects including ARC, DEST, Australian Commonwealth government funding, Australian CRC-SI (Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information) and collaborative research with European funding. He has been also consulted widely on SDI, Land Administration, GIS applications and spatial data management to many national government agencies and different ministries.

His research interests include Design, Management and Implementation of Spatial Data Infrastructures (land and marine environments), Sustainable Cities, spatially enabled governments and societies, 3D land and property management, and ICT enabled land administration.