BUILDING THE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY INFORMATION NETWORK

The nation's geological Surveys agreed in early 2007 to develop a national geoscience information framework that is distributed, interoperable, uses open source standards and common protocols, respects and acknowledges data ownership, fosters communities of practice to grow, and develops new web services and clients.

Geological Surveys have unique resources and mission-specific requirements that include the gathering, archiving, and dissemination of data. The Surveys will benefit from employing this “service-oriented architecture” approach. First, online data and other informational products from Surveys will be more readily available to the world audience and more valuable because they will be interoperable. Second, data and applications from external sources will be readily accessed and integratable. Third, a large federated data network will create opportunities for the broader community, including academia and the private sector, to build applications utilizing this huge data resource.

Our premise is that a national network of geological survey digital data, from an estimated 2,000 – 3,000 databases, can be a tipping point in creating a transformational advance in geoinformatics. By demonstrating national cooperation for data access and interoperability among all the geological surveys, we may be able to serve as a model for broader cooperation in geoinformatics across the entire earth science community and beyond.

The emerging national geological information system concept involves four components: 1. Agreement on open-source standards and common protocols (e.g., Open Geospatial Consortium standards. 2. Data exchange model – we will use the geoscience mark-up language, GeoSciML. 3. A data catalogue will be a proto-type for discovery of information at the network and system level. 4. Data integration tools are being built by a number of independent projects that can be applied to data in the network.

In the end, the geoinformatics contributions will be in networking existing components, while allowing new elements to be incorporated into the system seamlessly and almost effortlessly, especially by independent developers, without explicit approval or oversight by the network designers.