AuScope Spatial Data InfrastructureSupporting Earth Science

Dr Robert Woodcock

CSIRO

?

Federal

Provincial

Territorial

Regional

Municipal

NGO

Industrial

decision makers

bedrock

surficial

mineral

geochemical

geochronologic

hyrdrogeological

Geo-information

geophysical

knowledge baseWith acknowledgement to Boyan Brodaric, Natural Resources Canada

“Business intelligence” as decision support

Hazard management…Where do I run?

Ole Nielsen, Geoscience AustraliaStephen Roberts, ANU

Managing a natural hazard involves many organisations…

decision making

Resource Assessment

geohazards

inundation

hazard potentialhazard uncertainty

Earthquake locationEarthquake magnitude

Policy

buildings

bathymetry

geophysics

Seismic

Community Info

Environment

Geo-information

• vulnerability, risk cost Human Facility Economyloss Environment

Risk Assessment

Tsunami risk mapIntegrated Assessment

resource assessment modeling vulnerability, risk

assessment modelingintegrated assessment

modeling

Tsunami emergency response

geohazards

Town planninginundation

Vulnerability, risk

Slide adapted from Boyan Brodaric – Natural Resources Canada

• Water Resources• Bureau of Meteorology – legislative mandate on

water data• 300 data providers• Dozens of data products

• What format?• 95% say Comma Separated Values – what about

relationships?• Is “T” Temperature, Time, Total, Turbidity?• What about Units of measurement? Temperature,

Kelvin, Centigrade, Fahrenheit?

There is more to standardisation than file formats and legislation

It’s all quite traumatic! How do I make it work for me?

Rendered into a map layer AND queried by a user or….

… formatted into a report or ….

… read and used by any enabled application

Slides courtesy Stuart Girvan – Geoscience Australia

The trouble is…Its about “their” workflow

Making it work for “you”Who are you? Consumer, Provider or both!

Provider

ConsumerStandardise Information modelsStandardise the Query interface

Do not change my internal operations dramaticallyDo not second guess the Consumers workflow

Standardise the Information Models

• Not a storage problem…• User View (Data Products)• Custodian’s View

(Consistency, Efficiency)• Systems View (bandwidth,

query cost)

• Semantics and structure• GML and GML application

schemas

• Tool support• UML, Hollow world and

Fullmoon

Geography Markup Language

Community Agreed Service Interfaces and Information Models

AuScope service catalog

Standard Vocabularie

s

VocabularyService

Service Registry

Client Applications

Gateway Services

Facilities

Discovery Portal

Government Department

Data

Geological SurveyWeb Feature Service (WFS)

Analysis Workflow

Standardise the Services

URN ResolverService

URN ResolverService

VocabularyService

Community Agreed Service Interfaces and Information Models

AuScope service catalog

Standard Vocabularie

s

Service Registry

Client Applications

Gateway Services

Facilities

Discovery Portal

Government Department

Data

Geological SurveyWeb Feature Service (WFS)

Analysis Workflow

The Spatial Information Services StackTools of the trade

Geoserverwith Application Schemas

Some lessons worth listening too…

• Open Geospatial Consortium • Use OGC as a starting point

• And its information standards…

• And its service interfaces…

• It can be quite a stack of paper!

• OGC breaks problem into specific aspects

• Use it to identify necessary services for your application

• It pays to get assistance from specialists in the community

• use Roadmaps and Guides

• OGC is NOT enough• domain specific vocabularies

required

• Many gateway services do NOT support this

Things to watch out for

• Your data isn’t as consistent as you’d hoped• Data management improvements

• change in business practice!

• Private information models exposed• Simple Features with “labels and values” is not enough• Meaning (semantics) is essential – Community models

• Technology doesn’t quite allow you to jump from what you have to what you need in 1 configurable step…

• Components can be improved

Reality Check!!SEE Grid National Roadshow

“the explorers agreed that the SEEGrid project for interoperability of precompetitive geoscience data was essential when it comes to long term benefits to aid future exploration effort in Victoria.”

• Chris Fraser, Executive Director, MCA Victoria – August 2005

“The Australian Geoscience Council therefore recommends:…

The development of new ways to store and access data and information (such as the SEEGrid) should be embraced…”

• Mike Smith, President, Australian Geoscience Council Submission to Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council

AuScope brings the community together using open spatial standards