Some international collaborations in geoscience informatics: IUGS GeoSciML testbed, & AUKEGGS forum Simon Cox CSIRO Exploration and Mining 11 December 2006

2 of 9 AGU Fall 2006 ESSI Townhall Standards Context Open Geospatial Consortium  web interfaces for geospatial data  standard framework for domain-specific information models and encodings Grid  commodification of remote access to  high performance computing  high volume storage

3 of 9 AGU Fall 2006 ESSI Townhall

4 of 9 AGU Fall 2006 ESSI Townhall 2 projects GeoSciML

5 of 9 AGU Fall 2006 ESSI Townhall GeoSciML IUGS Commission for Geoscience Information Geological surveys + other agencies needs:  Efficiently exchange and publish archived data in re-usable form  Support single Point-of-Truth GeoSciML v1.1  GML Application schema for Geology  Based on conceptual information models from USGS/GSC/BGS/CSIRO 2006 testbed - 8 geological surveys, 6 countries  On-demand from survey datastores, converted into GeoSciML at source, delivered using OGC WFS & WMS

6 of 9 AGU Fall 2006 ESSI Townhall GeoSciML Testbed2 architecture Sweden UK USA Canada GAFrance Databases, digital maps with local data structures Data sources GSC client (Phoenix) Desktop client (eg: Carbontools Gaia) BRGM client (Ionic) Web clients Display, query, download Map local data structures to GeoSciML data structure Web services Geoserver ArcIMS Cocoon Ionic GeoSciML Mapserver Cocoon ArcIMS Cocoon Geoserver GeoSciML

7 of 9 AGU Fall 2006 ESSI Townhall  select an area  download GeoSciML to local PC GeoSciML Testbed 2 – Use Case 2 ▪ Download data in GeoSciML format

8 of 9 AGU Fall 2006 ESSI Townhall AUKEGGS Support for Earth Science research  Esp. fluid-earth sciences Focussed on reconciling “Grid” (Globus, WS-XX) and Open Geospatial Consortium approaches  Grid strengths: Coordination and chaining, AAA, stateful services, high- volume, high-performance  OGC strengths: Rich interoperability, with strong community semantics, through rigorous content models, registries Outcomes:  NERC NDC uses OGC combo with Globus and WS-XX for workflows  Engagement with WMO  Development of best practices in relation to GML + Coverage data + non-XML data sources  Improvement of best practices in standardizing metadata profiles  Community building

9 of 9 AGU Fall 2006 ESSI Townhall Organization, funding and futures AUKEGGS  Academic/research focus  UK NERC funds for travel, meetings  Follow-ups as opportunity arises GeoSciML  Statutory custodian focus  Participating orgs support own staff through existing projects  No $ for collaboration & project management  Operational systems  Issues with governance and version control  Futures:  2008 Testbed for IGC  oneGeology global 1:1M compilation