Smart city aims to improve lives of its residents, create more opportunities, and build stronger communities. Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), as a framework to promote geospatial data sharing and consumption, will be one of core foundations to achieve the vision.

With the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices and the connection, the public becomes more connected and accessible. This trend provides the government an opportunity to not only offer user-centric service anytime and anywhere, but also enrich its data via crowdsourcing and in return to be able to enable data-rich and analytics-based services to the public. In addition, with the evolvement of technologies, the government is able to deliver reliable and authoritative services despite the development budget is often under pressure.

In this paper, we present the effort from Singapore Land Authority (SLA) on developing SDI for the smart homeland by means of a spatially enabled open platform to serve the public in a comprehensive and collaborative manner from the aspects of data and services, technology and development approach.

The platform enables new ways of data creation via multiple directions, namely, government to residents, residents to government, and residents to residents, for example, leveraging crowdsourcing to chronicle Singapore’s history. Our platform also offers special data and location-based services in Singapore local context.

We choose open source to implement the platform and host it in the cloud environment. The full open source stack consisting of Leaflet, MapBox, CartoDB, and MongoDB increases the collaboration opportunities with the larger developer communities. The cloud computing technology saves us the operating cost and eases the scalability issue.

Being aligned with Singapore government’s direction on building in-house capabilities direction, our platform is developed in house with a team of application specialists. This in-house development approach supports the agile project methodology so as to improve the responsiveness to changes and reduce the time to market. Moreover, the specialists strengthen their geospatial capacities and competencies, and this can ensure the sustainable manpower growth needed for a continuous development of SDI for smart homeland.