Along with the South West Catchments Council we were successful in receiving funding from the State Natural Resource Management Community Capability Grants round for some major redevelopment of our Geographical Reporting and Information Database (GRID), which is now in use by all bar one of the Natural Resource Management (NRM) groups in WA. You can read more about the project in its entirety here.

This is the first of a series of posts documenting the progress of the GRID enhancement project, which covers a critical component of any spatial platform – data management.

Centralised data sourcing

Problem
While GRID provides a cloud solution for the management of both on-ground activities (e.g. fencing, revegetation, beach clean-ups) and reference information (e.g. hydrology, roads, imagery) there is still the need to source the latter data sets from relevant custodians. Once acquired this data must be managed effectively to ensure data versions, metadata and licence details are easily accessible and continually updated – a common bugbear for any group or organisation working with spatial data.

Solution
This project provisions for the centralised sourcing and management of all reference data (or baselayers) for the participating NRM groups until June 2018, which will all be consumable online through GRID.

This component will be completed by:

• Engagement with NRM staff to establish baselayer preferences,
• Engagement with data custodians to consolidate the data sourcing and licencing process,
• Logging all sourced information to a data management standard, which will be shared amongst the NRMs,
• Uploading or updating all baselayers on GRID for each NRM group,
• Establishing direct web map services where possible to ensure continuation of services beyond the life of the project.

This is a much anticipated component, saving a lot of time and effort both for the NRM groups and the data custodians.

If you would like to know more about how we could help you with your data bugbears, please get in touch directly via james.houston@gaiaresources.com.au. Or, feel free to start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn or call us on 08 9227 7309.

James