The role of Geoscience Australia (GA) is to provide first class geoscientific information and knowledge which enables government and community to make informed decisions about:
- the exploitation of resources
- the management of the environment
- the safety of critical infrastructure and
- the resultant wellbeing of all Australians.
GA has two internal catalogues which hold metadata of significant value to external researchers. The catalogues include national collections of satellite images/datasets; geological and topographical maps of various scales; Maritime, Aboriginal Commission and Postcode boundary datasets, plus other geoscientific thematic maps and collections. Staff from GA and ANDS worked together to analyse the catalogues, map them to the ISO19115 metadata schema and provide a gap analysis to inform further development. The original intention was to cross walk the 19115 profile to RIF-CS and install an OAI-PMH harvest point. ANDS, however, was able to utilise funded work by AuScope by having an instance of GeoNetwork deployed in GA, which provides this capability and can be leveraged to expose this data at the same time. This mapping also allows data of relevance to other disciplines such as that relevant to marine research to be identified and appropriate feeds established.
The more significant achievement for GA was that it is now able to dynamically map from two existing independent internal catalogues to a single standards compliant instance, without having to first create a single internal catalogue and then migrate metadata from various catalogues into it. This approach will be used for other data types where GA has several internal databases of the same data type.
This poster explores the issues that confronted the team, the solutions developed and the opportunities that have arisen.
