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

[Cameron Shorter]

I had a productive conversation with Rob Woodcock last week further 
discussing how we should move forward with Geonetwork and Geoserver.

Australia, like the rest of the world has seen the value of a working 
SDI and over the last decade has started deploying nodes into a national 
Spatial Data Infrastructure. Some of these nodes are in production, but 
to date most have been deployed as Proof of Concepts. To move to the 
next phase we need production quality infrastructure.

This is very achievable. We have all the key requirements for a 
successful project:

1. There are many Government agencies with a desire and use cases for 
SDI. These agencies have budgets to solve their immediate business problems.

2. CSIRO, through the NCRIS project have budget and mandate to address 
many of the core SDI infrastructure issues, in particular targeting 
Geonetwork and Geoserver.

3. We have companies like LISAsoft with the experience to provide 
production quality service for the Open Source Geospatial stack.

I propose our next steps to be:
a. Set up a wiki to collect this information. Rob Wooddate suggested 
using the Seagrid twiki. (Rob, care to suggest a starting page).
b. Collaboratively scope who all our stakeholders are. (Ben Searle, I 
suspect you can jump start us here).
c. Define our key user requirements. I understand these have been 
identified before. Where are they kept? Do they need to be revised? 
(Ben, again I think you are likely to be able to give us a jump start)
d. Scope the work, assemble a development team, deliver to milestones, 
work closely with Open Source community, as per Project Management and 
Software Development principles. The project will likely include both 
multiple stakeholders and multiple development organisations, and hence 
particular attention should be paid to strong project management. This 
is quite achievable - it has been done by Open Source projects for 
years, but it is a risk area to watch closely.

robert.woodcock at csiro.au wrote:
>
> 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
>
> 	
>


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Commercial Support for Geospatial Open Source Solutions
http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html