With the increasing emphasis on electronic rather that paper products, the need for adequate metadata is becoming more and more pressing. The new AGSO Catalog is designed to address this problem at the corporate level. Developed from the AGSO Products Database, the AGSO Catalog is designed to encompass most of AGSOs outputs, datasets and resources. It does this with the help of various intranet and Web interfaces. Projects or authors must initiate Catalog entries, for without an acceptable metadata a product cannot be sold by the Sales Centre, or permission to publish will not be granted. The Catalog is the key to future systems of information distribution and sales. It will permit us to go directly from the metadata to the electronically stored objects, thus enabling automated information distribution and electronic commerce.

This report contains a data dictionary for the hydrogeology products released by the Great Artesian Basin Water Resource Assessment

This report provides detailed descriptions (metadata) of 45 Australian marine environmental datasets that have been generated and collated by the Marine Biodiversity Hub as part of Theme 3 - National Ecosystems Knowledge, Project 1 - Shelf and Canyon Ecosystems Functions and Processes. The report also includes a map for each dataset to illustrate coverage and general spatial structure. The datasets contain both marine environmental and biological variables from diverse data sources and include both new and updated information. Among them, the national bathymetry grid and derived products, seabed sediment grids, seabed exposure (GEOMACS) parameters, water quality data, the national canyon dataset and connectivity layers were produced by Geoscience Australia. Other environmental and biological datasets are the outputs of oceanographic models and collections of various governmental and research organisations. These datasets are important for the success of marine biodiversity research in Theme 3 Project 1 in that they describe key aspects of Australian marine physical, geochemical and biological environments. The physical and geochemical datasets not only characterise the static seabed features but also capture the temporal variation and three-dimensional interactions within marine ecosystems. The biological datasets represent a unique collection of fish and megafauna data available at the national scale. Together, these marine environmental datasets enhance our understanding of large-scale ecological processes driving marine biodiversity patterns. However, we should be aware of the uncertainties and potential errors exist in these datasets due to limitations of data collection and processing methods. Data quality issues of individual datasets have been documented in this report where possible.

Over the past 10 years, Australia has maintained 65-85% self-sufficiency in oil and better than 100% suffiency in gas. This has generated significant societal benefits in terms of employment, balance of payments, and revenue. However the decline of the super-giant Gippsland fields, discovery of smaller oil pools on the Northwest Shelf, and the increasing reliance on condensate to sustain our liquids supply sharpens the focus on Australia's need to increase exporation and discover more oil. Australia is competing in the global market place for exploration funds but as it is relatively under-explored there is a need to simulate interest through access to pre-competitive data and information. Public access to exploration and production data is a key plank in Australian promotion of petroleum exploration acreage. Access results from legislation that initially subsidised exploration in return for lodgement and public availability of exploration and production (E&P) data. Today publicly available E&P data ranges from digital seismic tapes, to core and cuttings samples from wells, and access to relational databases, including organic geochemistry, biostratigraphy, and shows information. Seismic information is being progressively consolidated to high density media. Under the Commonwealth Government?s Spatial Information and Data Access Policy, announced in 2001, company data is publicly available at the cost of transfer, after a relatively brief confidentiality period. In addition, pre-competitive regional studies relating to petroleum prospectivity, undertaken by Government, and databases and spatial information is free over the Internet, further reducing the cost of exploration. In cooperation with the Australian States and the Northern Territory, we are working towards jointly presenting Australian opportunities through the Geoscience Portal (http://www.geoscience.gov.au) and a virtual one stop data repository. The challenge now is to translate data availability to increased exploration uptake, through client information, and through ever-improving on-line access.

This report provides detailed metadata for the 37 marine physical environmental variables that were collated or specifically generated by the Marine Biodiversity Hub, which is part of the Commonwealth Environment Research Facilities Program. The work was done at Geoscience Australia and the Marine and Atmospheric Division of CSIRO. The data are required for use in the Hub's surrogacy and predictive modelling research. Bathymetry, geomorphology, seabed sediment and seabed exposure data were produced by Geoscience Australia. Bottom-water and surface-water parameters were produced by CSIRO. For each variable there is a general description, comprehensive metadata and a distribution map. All data were transformed to a common datum, WGS84, and converted to a grid with a cell size of 0.01 degrees. The metadata reports conform to ANZLIC standards. The data fall into five categories: 1. Bathymetry and geomorphology, derived from the 250 m resolution National Bathymetry Grid at Geoscience Australia; 2. Seabed sediments, derived from the MARS database at Geoscience Australia; 3. Seabed exposure, produced from the output of a seabed shear stress model, GEOMACS, at Geoscience Australia; 4. Bottom-water nutrients and temperature, extracted from the CARS database at CSIRO; 5. Surface-water parameters, derived from satellite images at CSIRO.

The fruits of geoscientists' labours are consigned increasingy to computer files. Although the capacities of electronic media are expanding rapidly, the means of keeping track of all these files is lagging. Knowledge-based organisations like AGSO need the electronic equivalent of libraries to house this information, the analogue of library catalogues to allow us to find critical bits, and the equivalent of librarians to manage the metadata. Files worth keeping must be kept permanently online, referenced by a metadatabase, visible on the Web, accessible from around the world, and in compliance with changing hardware, software and data standards.

PIMS, or the Petroleum Information Management System, is a database that keeps track of 376 000 seismic survey tapes and 2 800 petroleum well logs housed at the National Archives facility, at Chester Hill (formerly Villawood), Sydney - the largest tape archive in the southern hemisphere. PIMS is managed by AGSO's Petroleum Resources Program, which was formerly part of the Bureau of Resource Sciences. The survey tapes and well logs are basic data from petroleum exploration. They are loged under the Petroleum (Submerged Lands) Act, and are publicly available as a stimulus to further exploration.

The Australian National Marine Data Group was formed by the Heads of Marine Agencies (HOMA) to promote improved interchange of marine data in Australia. The ANMDG held a workshop of practitioners in May 2002 with the intention of identifying major areas of interest and tasks for working groups to address in order to make progress with development of marine data interchange in Australia. This Proceedings CD contains the presentations by speakers in the form of PowerPoint slides and a few Acrobat documents. It was distributed to participants in the workshop.

This Record provides a description of the development and use of the version of the AGSO Library catalogue accessible from AGSO's World Wide Web site. The Library's in-house catalogue of books and serials is part of the Datatrek Professional Series library management system. Although this system operates from a Novell network server, the lack of integration of AGSO's Novell networks and lack of access to them from the Unix system means that direct access to Datatrek system is only available in the Library itself. Also, the Datatrek system has no provision for access, either directly or indirectly, from the Internet. In the interests of making the Library catalogue more readily available to both AGSO's staff and AGSO's clients, a decision was made to develop a version of the Datatrek catalogue as an Oracle database, and that that version would be made available on the World Wide Web of the Internet with a forms-based search interface usable on any Web browser.

A prototype Python, utility called ncskosdump, which wraps the ncdump netCDF reading tool and adds a series of options for the retrieval and display of Linked Data that the tool is able to extract from a netCDF file, including links to vocabulary terms. The tool is presented in a code repository using the Git distributed version control system.