Social Change Online Wins National Oceans Portal Contract

In May 2005, Social Change Online was selected by the Department of the Environment and Heritage (National Oceans Office) of Australia, to design and develop an Oceans Portal application. Government and private agencies hold and maintain a wealth of data about the marine environment, however there has never been one central way to discover, access or combine the data. Such capability is critical, for both operational efficiencies and to support the goals of integrated marine planning.

Using the Oceans Portal, Web users will be able to search for and create online maps, graphs and reports of marine information, including oceanographic conditions (eg wave height, salinity), marine species distribution, physical oceanographic data (such as geology), and marine jurisdictions boundaries (such as defence training areas, native title interest and marine protected areas). The Portal will be designed to meet the needs of a broad range of users including planners, managers and users of the marine environment and its resources, scientists, academics and the general public. For example, users could potentially create a map showing whale species distribution against sea surface temperature for a given time period in a specific area.

This project is one of the first of its type in the world to be fully built on an ISO/OpenGeospatial R -based Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). SDIs are a technology-standards and management-based approach to solving the traditional problems associated with sharing data. From a data provider's perspective, an SDI enables agencies and departments to concentrate on core responsibilities and data custodianship: critically, this removes the need to expend effort on packaging and distributing data to other agencies, or manually importing and managing redundant copies of data obtained from third parties.

Data will be served through OGC R compliant web services (WMS, WFS, WCS etc). The Portal will be a fully OGC R compliant solution and will be built using WebMap Composer (SCO's spatial portal builder toolkit) linked to a Catalogue solution from CubeWerks. The solution exploits the ebXML registry model to support the full range of metadata required to effectively discover and access data services. A Catalogue is one of the key components of an SDI and can be thought of as a specialised database that is available to a group or specific information community to enable the organisation, discovery and access of geospatial resources and services.

This approach to building an SDI encourages clear separation of content and technology, allowing for system integration in a component "plug-in" framework. The architecture is highly extensible and scalable, allowing additional spatial data and geo-processing services to be plugged in to the infrastructure at later stages. Provided that services offerings conform to a simple profile of the OGC standards, data providers are free to choose which platform and software they use to provide the service.