A COORDINATED CENTRAL INFORMATION RESOURCE FOR LOCAL, REGIONAL AND NATIONAL LANDSLIDE DATA IN AUSTRALIA

It is impractical for a single agency to hold responsibility for maintaining a national landslide database at a level useful to decision makers. Geoscience Australia has successfully demonstrated the benefits of adopting information management strategies as a solution in bringing local, regional and national scale data together. This is the first time that ‘networked service oriented interoperability’ has been applied to a natural hazards domain. The result is that Australia now has an up-to-date central landslide database that makes full use of diverse data across three levels of government. The approach is centred on a ‘common data model’ that addresses aspects of landslides captured by different agencies. The methodology brings four distinct components together: a landslide application schema; a landslide domain model; web service implementations and a user interface.

Sharing and exchanging data more efficiently through an interoperable approach ensures full value is made of available information, and that responsibility for collecting and maintaining this data is shared across all agencies. Specific-purpose data not only continues to serve the needs of individual database custodians, but also now serves a broader need. Such a system establishes the foundation for a very powerful and coordinated information resource in Australia through its ability to collate and characterise large volumes of information, and provides a suitable basis for greater investment in data collection. At a minimum this provides Australia with a framework for a centralised national landslide inventory, which can connect other available landslide databases. There is also considerable capacity for this approach to provide State Governments with a simple way to compile and maintain their own state-wide databases, and to extend the approach across other natural hazard databases and integrate data from other domains.

Interoperability is becoming increasingly relevant to federal government decision makers and research groups, all of whom need to access data and information across Australia through one system. This is especially the case in the research and management of natural hazards in Australia where consistent information is needed to support evidence based policy development and decision making across all hazards.