SEEgrid Information Services Roadmap
The development of this Roadmap for Implementing Interoperability of Geospatial Data for the Minerals Industry is supported financially and in-kind by the AusIndustry Innovation Access Program
, Minerals Council of Australia, Government Geologists Information Advisory Council, Geoscience Australia (GGIPAC), Social Change Online, CSIRO Exploration and Mining, the CRC for Predictive Mineral Discovery and members of the minerals industry.
The Australian Government’s Innovation Access Program – Industry
provides grants for industry-led projects as part of its support for innovation, investment and international competitiveness of Australian businesses.
The program is offered through AusIndustry
and adopts the take-up of technologies and best practice processes to enhance the competitiveness of Australian companies. This can include grants for international specialist visits to Australia, technology access workshops, and demonstration and awareness projects. Private sector companies, industry groups, universities, scientific agencies and training institutions are all eligible for funding.
The Roadmap exercise is being conducted in 3 parts, with a target completion date of March 2005. The provisional Roadmap was written during Part A, and will be followed by a "reference implementation" demonstration supported by GGIPAC and Geoscience Australia in Part B. This provisional roadmap will be reviewed in light of the demonstration project and an open workshop will be held in March 2005. This workshop follows on from the inaugeral Solid Earth and Environment Grid (SEEGrid) workshop held in August 2003.
This provisional Roadmap is a "living document"
and as such its authors welcome comments and suggestions to improve its content, style and implementation into the community of practice. It was written by a consortium consisting of:
- Dr. Robert Woodcock CSIRO Exploration and Mining
- Dr. Simon Cox CSIRO Exploration and Mining
- Mr. Rob Atkinson Social Change Online
- Mr. Stuart Girvan Geoscience Australia
- Mr. Tim Mackey Geoscience Australia
- Dr. Lesley Wyborn Geoscience Australia
- SEEGrid will provide an infrastructure that enables multi-stakeholder collaborations for research, operational and outreach activities with particular emphasis on government, industry and academic sectors.
- SEEGrid will seek to leverage and empower existing and future activities through enabling interoperability within the sector, providing an overarching framework for interoperability, as opposed to prescribing technical solutions for individual projects.
- SEEGrid will not be based on any single technology platform, but will allow open source and proprietary solutions to co-exist.
- SEEGrid Information Serices Roadmap will provide a design to systematically evolve an effective community through emerging activities within the sector (as opposed to a single technology deployment exercise)
- The SEEGrid infrastructure will encompass the technical standards, policy, governance framework to allow for semantic interoperability to be established within the community of practice.
- There may be either technical or business reasons why potential stakeholders will be unable to participate in initial stages, so SEEGrid must establish initial capabilities that demonstrate a long term value proposition and provide opportunities for engagement.
- SEEGrid will provide the bridge between data management, research, high performance computing and business needs. In particular, it will provide the means for technical collaboration between these functions
- SEEGrid will be implemented within the context of the Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure. This means that it will:
- conform to relevant government policies
- be able to seamlessly access services provided by external agencies
- become the primary mechanism for delivery of geosciences and environmental data and modelling capabilities to external agencies
- be a focal point for resourcing the resolution of technical and institutional issues hindering interoperability within and across the SEE domain
Summary of requirements for interoperable Web Feature Services
This section highlights the critical issues underlying interoperability of data access services.
- Community data models
- GML Application schema(s) for feature types of interest
- code-lists/authority tables
- feature-type index/classification (ontology?)
- server-side WFS software
- connecting to existing DB and GIS systems
- supporting a mapping to arbitrary (community) information model/schema
- client (desktop, browser and/or server application) WFS software(to explore design, exercise and demonstrate information services)
- basic semi-interactive portrayal service (i.e. drawing maps)
- query-building interface
- access to shared infrastructure services
- service catalog - somewhere to advertise service access point to a user community
- feature type catalog - a means of deploying the community schema as reference point so that the delivered data can be described
Softer-ware (process and governance)
- conformance testing
- WFS software
- GML application schemas
- service instances
- clear "use cases" for the system
- modelling of what information is required to support use cases
- access control strategy
- accounting strategy
- versioning strategy
This document is organised according to the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) analysis viewpoints.
RM-ODP offers an approach that supports coordination in the development of complex software systems implemented in a distributed context.
The viewpoints are as follows:
The RM-ODP framework provides five generic and complementary viewpoints on the system and its environment:
- The enterprise viewpoint, which focuses on the purpose, scope and policies for the system. It describes the business requirements and how to meet them.
- The information viewpoint, which focuses on the semantics of the information and the information processing performed. It describes the information managed by the system and the structure and content type of the supporting data.
- The computational viewpoint, which enables distribution through functional decomposition on the system into objects which interact at interfaces. It describes the functionality provided by the system and its functional decomposition.
- The engineering viewpoint, which focuses on the mechanisms and functions required to support distributed interactions between objects in the system. It describes the distribution of processing performed by the system to manage the information and provide the functionality.
A viewpoint is a subdivision of the specification of a complete system, established to bring together those particular pieces of information relevant to some particular area of concern during the design of the system.
Although separately specified, the viewpoints are not completely independent; key items in each are identified as related to items in the other viewpoints.
However, the viewpoints are sufficiently independent to simplify reasoning about the complete specification.
The mutual consistency among the viewpoints is ensured by the architecture defined by RM-ODP, and the use of a common object model provides the glue that binds them all together.
- The technology viewpoint, which focuses on the choice of technology of the system. It describes the technologies chosen to provide the processing, functionality and presentation of information.
(from Vallecillo, RM-ODP: The ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing
The enterprise viewpoint focusses on the institutional issues that need to be addressed in order for an organisation to participate in interoperability. Important issues that are addressed include:
- the costs involved in participating (or not). This includes a cost-benefit analysis, comparing the cost of servicing individual requests by traditional means, as opposed to adopting this roadmap;
- why and how to adopt technical standards;
- creating a corporate attitude that technical standards enable the business, rather than constrain it;
- developing a governance framework to define responsibility and control mechanisms.
The information viewpoint is concerned with establishing the semantic context of system components.
This is specific to the application domain and the computational problems that it addresses.
For geographic information, the contemporary meta-model, advocated by ISO/TC 211 and Open GIS Consortium, focusses on geographic features
, and the process focusses on information communities
Establishing the information model for the community is primarily a matter of developing a catalogue of feature types
of interest to the community.
This viewpoint captures the details of components and interfaces from a functional
point of view, without regard to distribution.
SEEGrid will be established by linking business functions through network infrastructure.
Each business function will be encapsulated through a service
that provides a consistent and predictable means of accessing that function.
This "Service Oriented Architecture" (SOA) approach distinguishes SEEGrid from distributed systems that use opaque proprietary protocols and/or persistent connections between stateful software components.
The Engineering Viewpoint introduces practical issues about what components are deployed where. SEEGrid responds to the many challenges inherent in optimising deployment configurations and information transfers by enforcing sufficient semantic consistency that, in general, any process can be deployed anywhere on the network without having to redesign the information models.
Overview needed ...