Accessing Australian geodynamic information: The AGCRC website

• Published in: Australian journal of earth sciences Vol. 49; no. 4; pp. 613 - 622
• Main Authors: Cox, S. J. D., Covil, K. D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Taylor & Francis 01.08.2002; Blackwell Science Pty
• Subjects: Australia; data; digital data; geodynamics; GIS; indexing; internet; metadata; World Wide Web
• ISSN: 0812-0099; 1440-0952
• DOI: 10.1046/j.1440-0952.2002.00943.x

The Australian Geodynamics Cooperative Research Centre (AGCRC) website <http://www.agcrc. csiro.au/> provides the main integrated presentation of the results of AGCRC research. It hosts a systematic presentation of project summaries, publication abstracts, regionally organised geodynamic syntheses and a GIS database containing a large number of broad-scale earth science datasets from the Australian region, which are presented through an interactive map viewer. Effective interfaces are required to make the variety of content accessible to users. In particular, maintaining effective hyperlinking for a large and growing set of pages was a significant challenge. We found that by developing effective indexing tools we were able to apply a uniform technology to attack these problems. The index included both the full text of the pages from the website and also specific index terms of metadata. The metadata schema was designed to support both generalised discovery through a search interface and also to allow hyperlinks to be included automatically in pages by the server, so that the user could browse in a richly cross-linked framework. It was necessary to manage textual and numeric data within the same framework because even the textual documents were generally tied to geospatial locations identified by their geographical coordinates. This required extensions to standard index and search tools, including the development of complete new indexing software. To assist the user in accessing the index, we provided a variety of user interfaces specialised for different themes in the website. For example, publication lists are generated in a conventional layout, and geospatial datasets are presented through an interactive map viewer and query system. The latter also demonstrated how visualisation tools for geospatial data can be provided in the web-browser interface.