An information technology conference will be run in conjunction with a United Nations workshop being held at Charles Sturt University on 19-22 October.

Improving hazard management for emergency services, is one of the studies to be featured at The Spatial Metadata and Online GIS Conference, being hosted by CSU's School of Information Technology. The conference has attracted almost 100 delegates of industry, education, key government departments, online development and private enterprise, from all over Australia.

The CSU conference is being run alongside a United Nations workshop also being held at CSU's Bathurst Campus to develop a new international agreement on land ownership and determination.

The information technology conference will concentrate on the topical area of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology and its use in cadastral mapping data (photographed by satellite), of private and public land parcels, around the world. The focus of discussion will be GIS and the Internet.

A number of papers by academics and students in the field will be presented at the CSU event. PhD student Sunil Bhaskaran from University of NSW who has used Bathurst and Hornsby in his case study into the application of GIS and remotely sensed data in hazard management practices for emergency services, is included on the program.

Keynote speakers from Great Britain, the Netherlands and the United States will address the CSU conference on international developments in the application of the GIS technology. These include Hugh Calkins, Professor and Head of the Department of Geography at Buffalo, New York.

Meanwhile, in their closed workshop, the UN delegates will develop a new international agreement to be known as the Bathurst Declaration on Land Tenure and Cadastral Infrastructures to Support Sustainable Development.

CSU conference delegates will join with the UN members for the announcement of the Bathurst Declaration, in a ceremony at 3pm on Friday 22 October.