new version for Australian National Soil Information System (ANSIS)

[pvgenuchten]

The new Australian National Soil Information System (ANSIS) v1.0 production environment is now live!!!

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In september 2024 a part of the ansis team visited ISRIC and we had an opportunity to look at the governance and components in detail, some conclusions:

• Ansis is not a database, but a central registry to access data from various institutes (states, universities, etc)
• Organisations can advertise their data as 'not open', potential users can request access to a set of data via the central hub, once granted the data is ditributed through the hub
• Ansis stores centrally point locations with metadata (what is measured where), to retrieve the actual observation data, the remote system is queried and the data is harmonized to a standardised model on the fly, these harmonisation flows are a joined effort of the Ansis team and the contributing organisation.
• Ansis is a voluntary effort of organisations, there are no legal requirements for organisations to publish soil data, however the project funded a number of institutes for an initial effort to set up their infrastructure. Organisations participated to benefit from the re-organisation of their infrastructure. Another aspect of success is that the community-of-practice in soil science is historically quite strong in Australia

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From release email

This is the culmination of a 2-year project under the Australian National Soil Strategy, which operationally brings together the soil data standards, information modelling, schema and exchange work we have been progressing in Australia, and with our New Zealand colleagues for the last decade or more.

ANSIS is a distributed, federated system, which accesses soil data services directly from multiple data provider organisations and repackages disparate data for delivery of nationally consistent soil site and analytical data. It utilises a national standard data schema and vocabulary services to harmonise and standardise data, which is delivered in a consistent, analysis ready format to users through a Provider managed access environment.

I believe this is a world first approach within an operational production soil information system. It is a data exchange and harmonisation model, and technology, that could be adopted regionally and internationally. We are already considering opportunities to bring soil data together across the Pacific as a Pacific Regional Soil Information System. I’d be keen to discuss potential opportunities for a global initiative through the GSP. We are also considering potential adaptation by communities of practice across agricultural, environmental and other domains.

You can access the new ANSIS Data Portal at https://portal.ansis.net
A General User Guide can be downloaded from https://ansis.net/data/

Information about the ANSIS project, and links to the soil information model and standards used can be accessed through https://ansis.net

Following an extended development and testing process ANSIS v1.0 replaces the ‘proof of concept’ version launched at the Australian Soil Science Conference in Darwin in June 2023.
You will need to sign up for a new user account to ANSIS v1.0

ANSIS v1.0 provides a new platform for soil data discovery, meta-data query/filtering, and access to soil description and analysis data for over 261,100 soil sites, delivered by 9 individual data provider organisations. This addresses a major data discovery, access and standardisation pain point for hundreds of individual soil data users.

Registered users can access data in a nationally consistent, structured, well-described format (.json) which is analysis ready and machine-readable for incorporation into user developed tools and applications. ANSIS provides a basic data exploration tool to walk users through the necessarily complex relational hierarchy of soil data, from organisations, people and projects, through soil sites, site visits, profiles and layers/horizons. Users will need capability, specialist skills, and software applications to fully utilise ANSIS data output.

ANSIS will significantly increase the data use capacity and efficiency of soil research, data analysis and assessments, leading to improved soil information products becoming more readily available to support user needs across policy, education, industry and community sectors.

Sign up to ANSIS and start using soil data for your specific needs today!

[pvgenuchten]

the app is built using the svelte platform, the map is based on Mapbox SDK, background layer is provided by atlas.microsoft.com