Environmental Resources Information Network

Australian Spatial Data Directory (ASDD)

Quarterly Technical Report

October to December 1999

Introduction

This quarterly report provides a technical status of the Australian Spatial Data Directory (ASDD). ERIN, Environment Australia, is coordinating the technical implementation of the directory. At the end of December 1999, there were 17 nodes within the ASDD with a total of 36,004 dataset descriptions available for searching. Statistics are provided for the ASDD covering number, compliance and reliability of nodes, number of hits and records per node for the months of October, November and December 1999.

ASDD Implementation Consultancy- IndexGeo Pty Ltd

AUSLIG, ERIN and ANZLIC have jointly funded this consultancy.

Achievements during past quarter

• Assisted ACT to begin planning for their new node.
• Assisted NLA to begin implementing their node.
• Assisted TAS to begin implementing their node.
• Partial assistance to Australian Antarctic Data Centre (AADC) to establish a node to serve both ASDD and GCMD.
• Assisted VIC to upgrade their document collection to XML metadata by enhancing their program which regularly dumps static documents from the Oracle database.
• General minor assistance to all existing nodes.
• Prepared proposal and discussion document for new optional metadata elements (e.g. scale, datum, etc.).
• Commenced new technical documentation to show how to establish an individual ASDD node.
• Prepared initial ASDD Frequently Asked Questions list - available to node managers via the ASDD Node Managers interface.
• Delivered final report to AMWG at Leura meeting.

Expected during next quarter

• Encourage remaining nodes to upgrade to XML document collections (i.e. NSW, ACT, BoM).
• Implement improved ASDD gateway interfaces for within/overlap advanced search.
• Finish new technical documentation to show how to establish an individual ASDD node.

Nodes

The following table lists the nodes and the number of records per node that were accessible at 31 December 1999.

Usage

The total number of hits recorded for the ASDD pages on the Environment Australia web site for the months October to December 1999 was 20,008 compared to 20,836 for the previous quarter.

Usage for the months of October, November and December 1999 was 7212, 6996 and 5800 hits respectively. A breakdown of users by top-level domain for the each month is shown below:

October 1999
Australia	3,587	49.7%
Unresolved	1,933	26.8%
US Commercial	552	7.7%
Network	290	4.0%
United Kingdom	138	1.9%
All Others	712	9.9%
	7212

Node reliability

A summary of node reliability for the period October to December is given below:

Node managers are automatically notified by email if a server goes down for a period longer than four hours.

Node descriptions

ASDD node descriptions http://www.ga.gov.au/asdd/tech/node/

It is the responsibility of each node manager to utilise the online document management application to describe their node and update the node description whenever they choose.

The following ASDD nodes are briefly described and include references to further information ...

• Airesearch Mapping Aerial Photo Catalogue
• AUSLIG Data Directory

• BRS - Incorporating Other Commonwealth Data

• EA Environmental Data Directory (Green Pages)

• IndexGeo Pty Ltd - Eco Companion catalogue

• NT Spatial Data Directory

• Queensland (QSID) Aerial Photography

• Queensland (QSID) Spatial Data

• South Australia Spatial Information Directory

• Victorian Spatial Data Directory

• WALIS Interragator-Aerial photography

• WALIS Interragator-Environmental Impact Statements

• WALIS Interragator-Bibliographic Data

• WALIS Interragator-Spatial Data