Implementation of feature identifiers for the Australian Hydrological Geofabric

[摘要] The goal of the Australian Hydrological Geospatial Fabric (Geofabric) project is to provide a common and coherent means of referencing hydrologic features in the landscape to improve the ability to interpret, combine with related data and aggregate water resource data.To achieve this, the hydrological connectivity of the landscape must be established, but this is a complex problem. The Geofabric addresses this by identifying the finest level of detail where coarse-scale assumptions of hydrological connectivity can be usefully applied and creating stable identifiers for the hydrological features. For example, the “Contracted Catchments” product creates catchmentsfor monitoring points and stably identifies them with persistent identifiers that can be used to retrieve their data in various forms as well as their metadata.The use of persistent identifiers raises the following basic challenges:1.How do identifiers behave (“dereferencing”)2.How are identifiers used (“linking”)3.How are identifiers created and managedThis report shows how Contracted Catchments identifiers may be used to cross-reference various forms of hydrologic data including:•More detailed stream location and interconnectivity•DEM-derived flow analysis of the landscape•Estimations of the boundary of catchments•Monitoring Point relative location and hydrologic connectivity•Observation dataThe approach used is to create “dereferenceable” URL identifiers – i.e. web addresses that resolve to data served from various Geofabric products and other Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) projects.A flexible approach to handling alternative representations of the same conceptual object is used which is consistent with trends in both the geospatial and internet data communities towards “Linked Data” as a means to make data access reliable on the Web. The standard Linked Data approach (which seeks to express structured data both containing hyperlinks for dataset interlinking and in a machine readable form, usually in theRDFformat) is extended to support geographic and observational data sources delivered by traditional services. This report outlines how identifiers for geospatial conceptual objects are created, how these are linked to information resources and how these identifiers may be used to make the Geofabric part of the broader hydrologic reporting environment.

[发布日期] 2013-03-31 [发布机构] CSIRO

[学科分类] 地球科学(综合)