Towards 2014: Planned ISIS Outputs

Abstract

The development focus of the design and implementation of the Soil Information System (SIS) is on the structured holding and maintenance of data arising from all other project activities, in addition to significant other legacy datasets. The SIS further represents the core source from which users and stakeholders will draw upon for their future use of the results of the overall project activities. The design and implementation must therefore not only be ‘fit for purpose’ for the immediate project requirements, be able to facilitate interoperability of the datasets, and must also be consistent with the principles of Directive 2007/2/EC, Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE). The resultant system will reside within a dedicated computer system suitable for the management and administration of the information, and which will enable the future provision of a range of packaged data-oriented services to end-users. Underpinning the SIS system will be a spatially-enabled relational database management system (RDBMS). This will serve to hold and manipulate the variety of data types, scales and sources required, including attribute characteristics tables to hold the descriptive property elements required in the data schema. Datasets elements held in the SIS will be grouped and identified for anticipated end-uses and user communities. Discovery-level Metadata will be collected for these groupings and published to appropriate ‘clearing house’ metadata servers, to ensure the widest possible appreciation of the data holdings as well as the most appropriate usage of the data. Metadata captured in this way will be consistent with the wider international standards emerging for such description and discovery resources.