1. In the Weeds with Soil Information
From Experiments to Operational Systems
Alistair Ritchie
Informatics, Research and Applications Team

2. How this brain dump should go
How we worked with a community to formalise distributed publication of our soil observation data
How that work influences operational systems
The good news: it does
The bad news: it does

3. OGC Soil Data Interoperability Experiment
Initiated by the IUSS Working Group on Soil Information Standards
Participants from Australia, Europe,
North America, New Zealand
Reconcile five existing standards …
… into a single standard

4. UH OH
Not quite … point to prove … can use existing standards

5. Soil Observations
ISO19156/OGC10-004r3 - Observations and Measurements

6. Soil Sensors
OGC15-043r3 – Timeseries Profile of Observations and Measurements

7. Soil Descriptions
OGC16-088r3 - OGC Soil Data Interoperability Experiment
Podzol Soil (Z)
[NZSC] Ah E
texture
bulk density
organic carbon
particle size distribution … Bh C

8. Soil IE Implementation
Maps
Sensor
Data
Soil Data
Execute PTFs
Gridded Data
HTTP URIs
(conneg)
Vocabularies
Soil Taxonomies
Observable Properties
WFS
WPS
SOS
Registry
PID Service
Client
WCS
WMS

10. Unnecessary Specialization
Not much to say now
Tackled head on this week … ‘what is a sample?’
Hugely important for us down in the weeds
Adds unnecessary complexity
(Arguable) domain specific concepts but not domain specific messaging
Soil scientists don’t work in isolation

11. Pedology is a cross-domain science
Digital Soil Mapping
Integrating data from multiple domains
Let’s lower the
data integration overhead

12. Keepin’ it real … the NZ National Soils Data Repository
O&M/OMLite
SOSA
PROV-*
Reg
SKOS
SHACL
RDFS …
ANZSoilML
GeoSciML
Big
Bucket of
Data
Mediation
Layer
Publication
Layer
-> ReST API (JSON, XML)
-> LD API (RDF)
-> SPARQL (RDF)
-> OGC W*S (GML …)
-> Data download (CSV, SQLite, …)
Clients …
Comprehensive
Structured
Atomic
Views supporting
Operational science
Publication of science
Government decisions
Clients …
Clients …
Clients …

13. Keepin’ it real … POWERFUL re-usable framework
O&M/OMLite
SOSA
PROV-*
Reg
SKOS
SHACL
RDFS … …
Big
Bucket of
Data
Mediation
Layer
Publication
Layer
-> ReST API (JSON, XML)
-> LD API (RDF)
-> SPARQL (RDF)
-> OGC W*S (GML …)
-> Data download (CSV, SQLite, …)
Clients …
Comprehensive
Structured
Atomic
Views supporting
Operational science
Publication of science
Government decisions
Clients …
Clients …
Clients …

14. Wrap up Distributed data problem requirement opportunity
Linked Data brings rigour to the solutions to this opportunity and a community that is solving problems science data providers have
Science is complex enough as it is – we must be careful not to compound that

15. Wrap up
We work with amazing and gifted ‘science programmers’ - they are rare
Many of us rely on (amazing and gifted) software engineers – usually with no science background
When we consider the organisation of a data and the behaviour of our systems we must remember that
Can’t set the barrier to use too high