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Abstract

A combination of off-the-shelf open-source software and custom-built middleware is used to unite remotely sensed marine data archives operated across Australia by five different agencies and make them accessible via a common interface to a user located anywhere on the internet. The utilisation of existing storage and some state of the art fileservers with a distributed data model, makes the system low-cost, scalable and robust. The creation of a virtual national data set with automatic cataloguing enables the development of advanced data services including aggregation and spatio-temporal time series and sub-setting. Data sets are served through OPeNDAP and automatically harvested for meta-data including temporal and spatial bounds. Spatio-temporal queries made on the catalogues provide information to allow retrieval of subset data, or if many data sets are returned, the aggregation of data matching the query. The software developed to implement the system is built as a set of layers with well defined interfaces, allowing system modularisation and a range of levels of access.

About the speaker

Peter J Turner earned his PhD degree in radio astronomy from the University of Tasmania in 1981. In 1981 he joined the faculty of the University of Maryland as a research associate based at the Clark Lake radio telescope in Southern California. Peter developed techniques for deconvolving the antenna response function from radio images. Peter returned to Australia and worked as a scientist at the then Telecom Research Laboratories in Melbourne. He developed techniques for analysing multipath radio propagation and improving the understanding of the mechanisms which result in signal loss. Dr Turner moved to CSIRO Atmospheric Research in the late 1980’s and became involved in the reception and analysis of environmental satellite imagery. Peter became a member of the Format Sub-Group of international Committee for Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) and developed ASDA, the Australia Satellite Data Archive (ASDA) format. In the early 90s Peter led the development and commercialisation of an image processing workstation. In the late 90s he led a project to develop software to process and analyse data acquired from environmental satellites. In 2002 Peter moved to Hobart to lead the remote sensing team at CSIRO Marine Research. In late 2006 he became coordinator for the IMOS (Integrated Marine Observing System) Satellite Remote Sensing Facility. Part of this role involved the design, planning and overseeing the implementation of the Australian Oceans Distributed Active Archive Center. Peter has research interests in signal processing, image analysis and software development.

Pauline Mak completed her Bachelor of Science with Computing Honours at the University of Tasmania. She is a member of staff at the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC) and is also part of the ARCS Data Collaboration Services team.