[Aust-NZ] RE: Finding a way forward - GeoNetwork as platformto support - unclassified [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[robert.woodcock at csiro.au]

Dear Bruce, Ben, Cameron, Simon and others,

 

This discussion is very welcome and timely and I congratulate Bruce on
taking the step to start this thread. I'd like to provide some
information on activities with which I am involved as I believe they can
provide some much needed resourcing and facilitation going forward.

 

Following Cameron's lead I will "pigeon hole" myself as I may well be a
new contact to most reading this list: I have a background in commercial
software development and R&D, in particular commercialisation and
technology transfer, involving geospatial information management,
interoperability, e-Research, high performance computing and numerical
analysis. I'm now the Director of Auscope Grid (an NCRIS initiative -
NCRIS 5.13 www.auscope.org <http://www.auscope.org/>  ) and the Project
Manager for the Spatial Information Services Stack (SISS - which Ben
Searle mentioned is part of NCRIS 5.16). To round out the
responsibilities, I'm also responsible (not solely, but I'm accountable
for the services and conferences) for the community forum on open
geospatial standards called the Solid Earth and Environment Grid
(SEEGrid - www.seegrid.csiro.au <http://www.seegrid.csiro.au/> ) and a
member of the NCRIS Australian e-Research Infrastructure Council (AeRIC)
and the NCRIS Engineering Architecture Taskforce (NEAT).

 

For a number of years my team (which is more than just CSIRO based but
that is a story for another day) has been working with others towards
the creation of an open standards based interoperable geoscience
infrastructure for Australia. Collaboration with both Australian and
International organisations resulted in the formation of the SEE Grid
community, a number of testbeds (e.g. CGI interoperability experiments
with GeosciML, Minerals Council of Australia and Geological Surveys
Geochemistry, ebXML registry and repository) and various information
models and tools (e.g. ANZLIC ISO metadata profile, GeosciML, OGC
Observations and Measurements, Geoserver community schema support,
Fullmoon and Hollow World GML application schema modelling tools). Most
of these outcomes have completed their "testbed" phase and some are
moving to ISO standardisation or broader uptake.

 

The reason I say this GeoNetwork discussion is timely is NCRIS has
provided an opportunity to make the step change from testbeds and
demonstrators to production grade services. To date many of the
activities have been, as Cameron noted, "for the work being done,
...under-resourced". This is particularly true as a move from testbeds
to production grade services requires considerable investment and
appropriate staff to achieve quality assurance, branch management, help
desk support, deployment, and so forth. It is a credit to the NCRIS
process and the Auscope board and AeRIC, that this investment is
actually being made (to the tune of nearly $10 million by mid 2011) and
the strategic objective, in an open standards/source way, is to achieve
production grade infrastructure for geospatial & geoscience information.

 

To this end, the NCRIS activities I am involved with (Auscope and SISS)
are:

*	Seeking feedback and engagement with the broader community on
where best to target the available resources to achieve the production
grade services infrastructure - fill in the gaps to production services
and complement/support the existing activities. Flexibility and
cooperation is a key ingredient
*	Establishing a quality assurance framework around the Spatial
Information Services stack including - packaging/installation,
regression testing/unit-test suites
*	Performing development on core open source technologies in the
stack so they are interoperable, in sync with the open source community
developments
*	Establishing a maintenance and support environment including
help desk, priority bug fixes in the Australian and New Zealand context,
deployment assistance, training, sample deployments
*	Developing features necessary to support the Australian and New
Zealand geospatial communities - in particular those areas represented
in NCRIS noting that is a very large group of Government and
non-government organisations already.
*	Seeking to facilitate/assist organisations and communities that
might be able to sustain the stack beyond the lifetime of the NCRIS
investments so that the organisations that deploy have a sustainable
technology base - with my CSIRO hat on success is defined as my not
having a job at the end of the activity! <grin>

 

On a more technical note, the SISS is currently based on the following
open source technologies:

1.	Geoserver - with community schema extensions
2.	GeoNetworks
3.	THREDDS, Hyrax
4.	Web Portals and Desktop clients - various samples are being made
available particularly for training and regression testing purposes
(e.g. Googlemap portal, udig, sample java desktop clients)
5.	OGC standards
6.	GeosciML standards for geoscience information

 

Due to our previous work we already have reasonably good links with the
open source communities involved and broadly the Australian and New
Zealand activities around Geoserver. Geospatial and Geoscience
information standards and the Web Portal and Desktop clients. We are
less well connected with the GeoNetworks community (something we are
actively seeking to improve) though we have a strong involvement in
registries, metadata standards and the ANZLIC profile.

 

Whilst I believe the strategic intent of these activities, our
collaborations, and the investment level are capable of contributing to
the broadly desired outcomes Bruce mentioned in his initial e-mail, the
move to production services and actually having a large investment does
create some additional challenges both in project management and the,
more important, social interaction side of the community.

 

Flexibility and communication are clearly keys to achieving our shared
objectives and I welcome any feedback or suggestions on how the
activities and resources represented by the Auscope and SISS investments
could serve the ongoing development of GeoNetwork , Geoserver and more
broadly the spatial information services stack. We do have a plan to
keep things moving but it is not set in stone and there is flexibility
in the resourcing to "grease the wheels" so to speak to ensure the
necessary gaps can be filled - you may just find we change the plan to
resource the need.

 

I look forward to continuing this conversation.

 

Regards,

 

Rob

 

 

Dr Robert Woodcock

CSIRO Exploration & Mining ,

ARRC, 26 Dick Perry Ave, 

Kensington, WA 6151 Australia

Phone +61 8 6436 8780 Fax +61 8 6436 8586

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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