Online Exclusive

By Robert Woodcock and Sam Bacharach

Robert Woodcock is AuScope Grid director, CSIRO; e-mail: Robert.Woodcock@csiro.au. Sam Bacharach is executive director, Outreach Program, OGC; e-mail: sbacharach@opengeospatial.org.

If youre a geologist, wouldnt it be great if you could go to a Web portal, select some large or small region of the Earth, and peruse a vast collection of surface imagery, soils data, gravitometric data and subsurface geology derived from a rich history of remote sensing, seismic studies, surface and drill sampling, and mining activity?

What if you could see carefully aligned photos of hundreds of drilling cores collected over time along a selected transect several hundred miles long? What if you could use an online toolkit of simulation, modeling, inversion and data mining tools to assemble from such data various 3-D and 4-D views of subsurface geology over any area you want to study? What if you were able to select a mineral from this dataset and immediately follow a link to the geochemical literature on that mineral?

Figure 1. AuScope features a varied spatial scope.

This is the dream that drove the design and implementation of AuScope (www.auscope.org.au). The AuScope infrastructure system, already useful for many purposes, will ultimately enable the progressive construction, refinement and ongoing enrichment of an online live, 4-D Earth model for the Australian continent and its immediate environs.

Paradigm Shift

AuScopes developers anticipate a paradigm shift, in research and other areas, to come from harnessing, organizing and providing ready access to the data, information and knowledge that result from use of the infrastructure. Making the new data, information and knowledge available outside the research community is expected to result in new and improved applications in science, business, education and policy.

Figure 2. The AuScope Model includes infrastructure, including a National Geospatial Reference Framework that provides improved location information for data acquired through the collection programs shown on the left. AuScope also aims to make the new data, information and knowledge available outside the research community to support improved science, business, educational and policy applications.

To realize this vision, the Australian government, under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), funded a non-profit company, AuScope Ltd., to facilitate the implementation of AuScope. Implementation involves putting in place a range of technologies and capabilities in data acquisition, management, modeling and simulation across the geospatial and geoscience spectrum.

The project brings together 23 participants, including Australias Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Geoscience Australia, 11 universities, and state government agencies. In addition to $42.8 million (Australian) in NCRIS funding, more than $70 million in co-investment has been committed by AuScope participants.

The Web-based informatics infrastructure for AuScope is largely in place. Now, in research centers, laboratories, libraries and agencies around Australia, geological survey records, imagery, maps, supercomputers and sophisticated software services of many kinds are online or coming online to fulfill the infrastructures potential.

The systems are linked as a "system of systems"� through high-bandwidth networks"referred to collectively as a "grid"�"and they communicate and interoperate across the Web through standards-based interfaces and encodings. As resources come online, each becomes a working part of a vast meta-resource unified through the standards-based informatics infrastructure.

Similar Technology Underlies AuScope and OneGeology

AuScope has provided important direction to OneGeology (www.onegeology.org), an international effort through which geological surveys worldwide are working to enable seamless interoperation on the Internet, using the same design principles and standards that underlie AuScope.

The design principles and standards enable "publish, find, bind."� As shown in Figure 3, metadata for and links to services (including data provision services) are published in registries (catalogs) that enable efficient automated Web searches. A client application uses the registry to find data or a service along with a link to the server that provides the data or service. The client then uses that link to bind to the server, invoking a service that enables the user to see, download or process data.

Figure 3. In a Web-based infrastructure, datasets and Web services are published to it (Publish), datasets and Web services are located through it (Find), and clients invoke the Web services to provide or operate on data (Bind).

Standards (e.g., html, http, XML, etc.) are required to make "publish, find, bind"� work in an open system of systems where any number of clients, services and registries can be added in ad hoc fashion. Open standards enable networks to grow without centralized control.

To make this model work for geospatial data and services, the clients, servers and registries must "expose"� interfaces that implement the OGC interface standards for Web Map Service (WMS; map image), Web Feature Service (WFS; feature, usually point and vector data) and Web Coverage Service (WCS; coverage, usually gridded). The OGC/ISO Geography Markup Language Encoding Standard, a geographic extension set for XML, is integral to these, and the ISO metadata model also is essential.

OneGeology and AuScope use GeoSciML, a GML application schema (a GML-encoded information model for a specific information community) that provides a standard information exchange model and encoding for geoscience data. GeoSciML was developed by a working group of the Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information, part of the International Union of Geological Sciences. CSIRO played a key role in this development effort. OneGeology, AuScope and GeoSciML all have been advancing in step, benefiting from considerable international coordination, including coordination with various international standards bodies.

In OneGeology, AuScope and other environments that use GeoSciML, each data server converts geological data from the providers private schema to the standard encoding as the data are served through interfaces that implement the OGC WFS Interface Standard. Thus, each geological survey can keep its own internal data structures while making the data available in all its detail in a common encoding to other users.

Key Benefits

Frequently, a user wants only a simple raster image or "map"� from the server, in which case the users client requests and the server provides such an image through interfaces that implement the OGC WMS Interface Standard.

Figure 4. The AuScope Discovery Portal provides Web browsing and download access to the information resources contributed by the community. Analytical software such as MS Excel and simulation codes also can directly access the information via Web services.

A standardized and automated "data model Rosetta Stone"� for data sharing reduces the barrier to data integration and encourages commercial development of tools for analysis and modeling applications. The tools can be implemented as online services that dont need to be installed by each user.

A key benefit is that accessible data in standardized formats allows sensible but ambitious software planning (i.e., software planning that provides substantial capability at minimal cost). And the global adoption of standards provides assurance of the value of new investments in systems that take advantage of the open Web-based framework.

Another benefit, and a key driver for developing AuScope and OneGeology, is that Earth-system science benefits from interaction among a wide range of multidisciplinary fields of research and from integration of research data. Integration of Earth-science data with other data from scientific domains will enable transnational research to solve global issues such as climate change and sustainable resource utilization.

Geosphere-biosphere-cryosphere-atmosphere interactions are particularly important. And international initiatives similar to OneGeology are underway in other domains, such as topology, hydrology, ocean science and climate. All are moving forward with the same basic technology framework and set of standards as OneGeology.

AuScope, with its integration of many different types of sophisticated technology for modeling, drill-sample analysis and high-performance computing, shows how the basic standards framework serves as a platform for converging powerful technologies and capabilities that may have specialized purposes.

More than Its Parts

This e-Research infrastructure makes it possible to federate nationally distributed datasets, develop tools to manipulate large data volumes and establish an appropriate governance framework to ensure sustainability. AuScope Grid will be augmented with distributed data storage hardware, high-bandwidth network links, data management protocols, middleware and software, all of which will enable AuScope to be substantially more than the sum of its parts. A key challenge will be to link the major geoscience and geospatial data stores of the government agencies with the high-performance computing resources and high-bandwidth networks of the academic community.

A coordinated approach to data acquisition, analysis, and simulation and modeling within the geology community by itself isnt sufficient. Cross-community communication is necessary to enable integration of the new AuScope computing and data grids with those of other NCRIS capabilities and research communities (e.g., water, spatial, etc.). To achieve this, AuScope Grid will be built and maintained in conjunction with NCRIS platforms for collaboration, and many of the base technologies will be shared across other NCRIS capabilities to better leverage resources.

AuScope and OneGeology are leading a major transition in data delivery for geological organizations and researchers. Geoscience data are becoming more easily accessible, and the latest versions of the data can be dynamically accessed. Growth in the size of the network increases the value of the data as well as the tools and Web services used to process the data.

Because other communities of interest are building similar systems that are interoperable with AuScope and OneGeology, the data are becoming increasingly useful in cross-disciplinary efforts to tackle transnational issues such as climate change and resource utilization.

To take full advantage of this infrastructure and the capabilities it supports, data custodians must ensure that their data can map to standards. This will depend on good internal governance, such as coordination on which standards to adhere to in procurements, coordination on data schemas and coordination on metadata development.

Authors Note: The AuScope spatial services infrastructure is based on open-source technologies and is available freely. For further information, contact Robert Woodcock at Robert.Woodcock@csiro.au.