Legacy product - no abstract available

The Corporate Administrative Records Collection of Geoscience Australia (GA) is a bi fold collection; consisting of electronic/digital documents and records in physical paper format. GA's corporate administrative records in physical format are created by the Records Management Unit upon request from staff members when their needs meet specific criteria. The files themselves are bound in cardboard folders and labelled and bar-coded according to their respective classification level and metadata information. Individually, the files are a detailed narrative of specific business activities; describing all of the administrative processes that occurred during an activity. The collection is organised according to a year series system; a method which has been constant throughout GA's evolution. The collection also consists of inherited physical records from various government departments. These include the AFFA series from the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Australia and the UB Series, sourced from the Uranium Branch. In collaboration with the relevant government departments, GA acceded custody of these series, and they are now managed in juxtaposition with the entire GA collection.

Legacy product - no abstract available

part-page article on stratigraphic issues

Legacy product - no abstract available

Geoscience data standards as a field of research may come as a surprise to many geoscientists, who probably think of it as a dull peripheral issue, of little relevance to their domain. However, the subject is gaining rapidly in importance as the information revolution begins to take hold, as ultimately billions of dollars worth of information are at stake. In this article we take a look at what has happened recently in this field, where we think it is heading, and AGSO's role in national geoscience standards.

This Record describes the scope of the Great Artesian Basin (GAB) Automatic Data Processing System and outlines Stage 1(Data Transcription), and describes Stage 2, the checking of coded data. The subject of this record is the permanent storage, updating, and retrieval for processing of the data passed through Stages 1 and 2. The system described was developed for application to drill stem test (DST; Formation Test) data by G.E. Seidel (BMR) and then extended to suit the general GAB data by G. Krebs (BRGM).

It is impractical for a single agency in Australia to hold responsibility for maintaining a national landslide database. Geoscience Australia has successfully demonstrated the benefits of adopting information management strategies as one solution in bringing local, regional and national scale landslide data together. In the first time that networked service oriented interoperability has been applied to a natural hazards domain, Australia now has an up-to-date central landslide database that makes full use of diverse data across three levels of government . The approach is centred upon a 'common data model' that addresses aspects of landslides captured by different agencies. The methodology brings four distinct components together: a landslide application schema; a landslide domain model; web service implementations and a user interface. Sharing and exchanging data more efficiently through an interoperable approach ensures that full value is made of available information, and that responsibility for collecting and maintaining this data is shared across all agencies. Specific-purpose data not only continues to serve the needs of individual database custodians, but also now serves a broader need. Such a system establishes the foundation for a very powerful and coordinated information resource in Australia through its ability to collate and characterise large volumes of information, and provides a suitable basis for greater investment in data collection. At a minimum the pilot project provides Australia with a framework for a centralised national landslide inventory, which can connect other available landslide databases. There is also considerable capacity for this approach to provide State Governments with a simple way to compile and maintain their own state-wide databases, and to extend the approach across other natural hazard databases and integrate data from other domains.

The International Forest Carbon Initiative, IFCI, is part of Australia's contribution to international efforts on reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. It focuses on technology transfer to developing countries by assisting them to implement national carbon accounting schemes modelled on that established by the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. Key inputs to those accounting schemes are mosaics of the best available satellite scenes in a given year. Collections of these mosaics, spanning periods of at least a decade, are used to determine changes to the extent and type of forest cover. Those characterisations are used to determine net forest carbon flux, which is a significant component of overall carbon flows in tropical countries. In support of these activities, Geoscience Australia manages a project to obtain, process, archive and distribute large volumes of satellite data, initially with a focus on Indonesia and other parts of Asia. Three key changes from 'business as usual' activities were required to process and manage, on a large scale, a satellite data time-series to support the International Forest Carbon Initiative. First, at Geoscience Australia, a new facility known as the Earth Observation Data Store is being developed. Secondly, innovative techniques such as the use of USB Flash Drives for data distribution and of DVDs for quick look catalogue distribution have proved beneficial for the participating agencies in developing countries, as well as for data transfers from regional satellite archives. Thirdly, much of the data, especially the Landsat satellite imagery, has for the first time been made available to the users with minimal restrictions, via the employment of open content licensing known as Creative Commons.

Fire-Note is a 6000+ circulation bulletin of the Aust. Fire and Emergency Service Australia Council (AFAC). This Fire-Note introduces GA's NEXIS (National EXposure Information System) to the fire and emergency services community.