The Australian Geoscience Information Network (AusGIN, www.geoscience.gov.au) provides geoscience data and information from all Australian state, territory and federal Geological Survey organisations, under the governance of the Australia/NZ Government Geoscience Information Committee (GGIC). The information includes geological and geophysical maps, data, and publications; minerals and energy legislative and regulatory guidelines in all Australian jurisdictions; and links to the standards used in Australian resources data and resource exploration reporting.
The flagship of AusGIN is the AusGIN Geoscience Portal - an online mapping portal built on open source standards and applications. The Portal provides access to geoscience data through web services which use agreed international and national standards. These include the IUGS CGI and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) geoscience data standards GeoSciML and EarthResourceML, the ISO19115 metadata standard, GGIC's MineralTenementML, and OGC web service standards (Web Map Service - WMS, Web Feature Service - WFS, Catalog Service for the Web - CSW).
Among the many datasets featured in the Geoscience Portal, each of the Geological Surveys deliver featured datasets from their own data holdings using GeoSciML (boreholes), EarthResourceML (mineral occurrences, mines), and MineralTenementML (mineral exploration and mining tenements). Because all these services comply to shared data structures, the Portal is able to apply common filter queries and symbolisation to all the services using standard protocols. The Portal also makes use of CGI and GGIC vocabulary services to construct common filter queries on the data services.
The Geoscience Portal also enables users to search ISO19115 metadata services to find more datasets and publications from the Geological Surveys. The Portal can query live CSW services (such as from Geoscience Australia), as well as using its own GeoNetwork catalog to periodically harvest metadata from those Surveys where live CSW services are not available.
