Marine Metadata Portal

Andrew Dennison — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 01:09:32 +0000

For the past few months we have been collaborating with the Western Australian Marine Science Institution (WAMSI) to build a metadata portal for WA marine metadata called IGEM (Industry-Government Environmental Meta-database).

The aim of IGEM is to promote and understand what marine studies have been completed; by whom and when. Its long-term goal is to avoid overlap in data collection and facilitate the sharing of datasets and knowledge among industry and government for the benefit of all marine users and long-term management of Australia’s marine estate.

The portal provides the ability for industry partners to add their own metadata records either via the upload of an existing XML file or by creating a metadata record using the form within IGEM. All uploaded records are then reviewed by a Curator before being released live to the site. Users can then view any available metadata records and search the records via a number of filters including; spatial, temporal, title and organisation.

Records can also be exported to a report to assist with users own report writing or for use during emergency response.

Existing metadata records are currently being added to the site in preparation for an expected release date in early February.

Andrew

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Nine Months at Parks and Wildlife

Andrew Dennison — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 01:18:59 +0000

For the past nine months I have working on-site at the Department of Parks and Wildlife (Parks and Wildlife) on a number of different projects within the Office of Information Management (OIM). I tend to be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades (master of none?) these days, so as well as working on a number of projects I also performed a number of roles including Business Analyst, Scrum Master and Developer.

The main projects I worked on included:

Knowledge Management Initiative

OIM’s ongoing program to improve digital information management tools within Parks and Wildlife using open Information and Communications Technology (ICT) ecosystem principles and architecture to enable and protect data collection, storage and access mechanisms for internal (and potentially external) users within the department. I joined forces with OIM’s Architecture and Systems Integration team to design and construct a suite of tools founded on contemporary open source software, while Piers and Alex were involved in also helping to build Departmental applications registers and provide guidance to this Initiative.

Biodiversity Audit

Serge and I both worked on the Biodiversity Audit (along with Florian from the Department), which is a decision support tool built around the 2014 Parks and Wildlife Biodiversity Audit. The tool provides users with the ability to quickly gain a regional snapshot of biodiversity issues as well as providing access to the raw data collected during the audit.

Biodiversity Audit is a custom solution built on top of the CKAN open source data portal.

BioSys

Serge, Tony and I worked on BioSys (again, with other Departmental staff – this time including staff from OIM, the Science and Conservation Division and the Kimberley Region), which is a pilot system to support the efficient capture, curation and management of field observation data. At this stage BioSys is only being rolled out to a single Parks and Wildlife region, with a view to include other regions in future phases.

BioSys was written from scratch using Django.

I really enjoyed working at Parks and Wildlife, they are doing some really innovative work at the moment and their approach to ICT systems by focussing on open resusable components really fits with our own philosophies on how these types of systems should be built. I think all of us involved are really looking forward to continuing our relationship with the people and the Department itself.

Andrew

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Django –

Marine Metadata Portal

Nine Months at Parks and Wildlife