Published by: Kirsten McKenna and Alison Ollerenshaw (26 May 2014)
Senior Researcher in Geology at Federation University Australia, Dr Peter Dahlhaus, has recently returned from Vienna after participating in the Groundwater Interoperability Experiment (GW2IE) workshop. Dr Dahlhaus is a member of a small group of international researchers involved in developing a logical model for GroundwaterML (groundwater mark-up language) version 2.0 (GWML2).
FedUni’s involvement in this important international collaboration is a direct result of the significant work conducted on Visualising Victoria’s Groundwater (VVG), a project conducted by Dr Dahlhaus and colleagues in the Centre for eCommerce and Communications (CeCC) at FedUni and a number of project partners. The VVG portal comprises interoperable technologies to successfully capture, aggregate and spatially depict groundwater data for Victoria. VVG was developed in the absence of standards for marking up groundwater data, however now, with the growth in new technologies and in globalisation, there is demand for an international standard for groundwater data to ensure increased interoperability for the future.
Dr Dahlhaus has previously participated as a member during numerous GW2IE conference calls - along with colleagues from Europe, North America and Australasia - to develop the conceptual model in a unified modelling language (UML). This latest GW2IE workshop in Vienna provided an opportunity for the group to progress to the logical model part of the experiment.
The logical model has been developed to incorporate existing standards and use relevant models to satisfy the requirements of various groundwater information systems such as European Commission's INSPIRE model, the Canadian GWML1 model, and the U.S. Geological survey (USGS), GNS Science New Zealand and Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) information systems.
The next steps for the model will involve input from CSIRO and National Resources Canada. FedUni will then lead the testing phase through an environmental test use-case followed by a commercial test, undertaken in collaboration with CSIRO and based on VVG data. Already, FedUni, CSIRO and BoM are collaborating on the development of the Australian National Groundwater Information System (NGIS), with GMWL2 expected to be the standard for data transfer throughout NGIS and the Commonwealth of Australia.
It is anticipated that GW2IE will be completed by September 2015.
For further information contact Dr Peter Dahlhaus, E: p.dahlhaus@federation.edu.au