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.

OZCHEM is AGSO's national whole-rock geochemical database (previously known as ROCKCHEM). This documentation explains the database structure and includes definitions of the database tables and columns (attributes). It is provided with all purchases of OZCHEM data, but can also be purchased separately. The documentation includes summaries and highlights of all the regional data sets that comprise OZCHEM.

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.

The Gravity Survey Index presents a summary of the essential specifications on about 1000 gravity surveys held in the National Gravity Database. Gravity measurements have been made in Australia since about 1900. Organised surveys for geophysical purposes (initially oil and coal exploration) have been conducted from 1939 onwards. The dataset includes surveys carried out by AGSO (BMR), state governments, private companies, universities and other organisations. The digital point data, maps and grids derived from these surveys are available as separate products. Additional to the survey index is the locations of the the Australian fundamental gravity network stations as a separate dataset.

This software supports GeoSCiML and was developed by GA and is called Fullmoon. This software will hosted on CSIRO's SEEGRID Site.

The ANZLIC Metadata tool uses the ISO 19139 (2005) metadata standard which is the current supported metadata standard used in Australia in its ArcGIS Desktop version 10.5 software package. This metadata tool is intended to be used through the ArcGIS Desktop version 10.5 software accessed via the description tab in ArcCatalog. The tool was previously developed and supported by Esri Australia but this was formally handed over to ANZLIC in 2017. Geoscience Australia in support of ANZLIC has developed this new metadata tool based on the previous work of Esri Australia and the new Esri Inc ArcGIS Desktop 10.5 Metadata toolkit. The tool is intended for users of Esri Inc ArcGIS Desktop version 10.5 software to create ANZLIC compliant ISO 19139 metadata associated with datasets.

No abstract available

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 `AGSO Catalog' is a directory or metadatabase* of AGSO's outputs that includes products, publications, datasets and resources. Built using AGSO's corporate Oracle database management system, the Catalog evolved from an earlier `Products Database' that provided a web query and ordering system for all products sold by AGSO's Sales Centre. This function continues, with web interfaces to all products in the Catalog. However, the Catalog also covers external articles, papers and other publications by AGSO staff, datasets that may be either sold or given away, and corporate resources, such as maps, images and GIS datasets, many of which were purchased from outside the organisation. AGSO's web site now includes a Catalog interface for articles and other publications by AGSO staff. The Catalog is designed to capture metadata* at the source ? the author, project manager, research group leader or AGSO Division. Any staff member with an Oracle logon can initiate a new entry in the Catalog via Oracle data entry forms on AGSO?s intranet. The Catalog also facilitates business processes associated with the production of datasets, publications, etc. Various checks and `sign-offs? have been included for quality assurance and to prevent unchecked metadata from appearing on AGSO?s external web site. More business rules will be added as the need arises.