INTEROP - Geoscience Information Network

Arizona Geological Survey, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Funds are provided to assemble key modules and adopt standards and protocols to build an interoperable national Geoscience Information Network (GIN) that already has strong community engagement and broad consensus. The GIN is being developed in the context of national and international communities for enhanced global geospatial data interoperability. In an NSF-sponsored workshop, the nation's geological surveys agreed to the development of a national Geoscience Information Network (GIN) that is distributed, interoperable, uses open source standards and common protocols, respects and acknowledges data ownership, fosters communities of practice to grow, and facilitates development of new web services and clients. Geological surveys have an estimated 2,000 3,000 databases that represent one of the largest, long-term information resources on the geology of the United States and collectively constitute a national geoscience data backbone for research and applications. This project will implement workshop recommendations to achieve the community vision by developing technical components, integrating them into a working network, and actively link geological survey and academic-based databases and services/tools to demonstrate the applicability, scalability, and transference capacity of the GIN.