Platform for Environmental Modelling Support: a Grid Cell Data Infrastructure
Grid-based topology is a highly efficient basis for spatial modelling, which is now core to many business activities, particularly in environmental and natural resource management in government. The majority of data in jurisdictional SDIs available to modellers is in vector and imagery format, and there is no single authoritative source for grid cell-based data. This gap in the Australian SDI presents a considerable overhead for most modelling projects in conversion and preparation of data, resulting in significant duplication in investment by both public and private organisations across Australia.
Key participants in the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI), including Victorian Government, GeoScience Australia and a member of the private consortium of 43 PL, Spatial Vision, recognised this gap in the ASDI. They formed a small working group, put together a project proposal and, with support from ANZLIC and ASIBA, obtained CRCSI funding for a demonstrator project, namely, Platform for Environmental Modelling Support (PEMS).
PEMS proposed to build a generic platform to manage grid cell data to support not only the data needs of modellers and GIS experts, but also the spatial querying and reporting needs of professionals in various functional areas of environmental and natural resources management, who provide supports to decision makers such as business managers, department heads and ministers. PEMS seeks to develop means of managing multi-scale data, time series data and data versioning to support modelling and simple spatial queries and reporting. A number of use cases have been proposed, which include land use modelling, monitoring and mapping, environmental indicators development, interactive fire risk assessment etc.
If successful, PEMS would contribute to the development of ASDI, eResearch infrastructure to support environmental and climate change research, and tools and services that can be commercialised or used by government.