NGIS

In close coordination with CSIRO Land and Water, the National Water Commission (NWC) and the Bureau of Meteorology, NGIS Australia has completed the architectural blueprint and a detailed investment and implementation plan for a national Australian Water Resources Information Infrastructure (AWRIS).

The challenge

There’s no doubt that Australia is facing a serious challenge in the effective management of one of the world’s precious resources – water. Critical to industry, precious environmental assets, commercial infrastructure and the lives of more than 20 million people, managing this resource to support our future is paramount to our survival.

The problem is that, currently, there is no way of accessing complex water resource systems from both government and private enterprise across the whole of Australia. The quality of the systems themselves is limited by poor data coverage.  Furthermore, water data is currently collected and maintained by more than 100 organisations.

To address the threat of future water scarcity, the Australian Government embarked on a multi-billion dollar, rapid national water reform agenda. The National Water Initiative (NWI) is an approach to managing these complex issues of water resource-sharing across state and other jurisdictional boundaries.

The NGIS solution

The issues confronting effective water management led to the creation of the Australian Water Resource Information System (AWRIS), which aims to deliver national water resource accounts and assessments through the development and maintenance of a freely accessible, integrated, water information portal – which will become a single, reliable ‘point-of-truth’ for all water-related data.

NGIS Australia – based on its broad experience with Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and its reputation as a leading spatial services provider – was appointed to design the underlying technical architecture for the systems and tools that underpin AWRIS.

The proposed architecture will deliver robust and reliable information on water availability, water quality and water usage on a national scale. This will enable AWRIS to deliver data, information, tools and reports to critically improve the decision-making capabilities of clients engaged in policy development, planning, operations, public enquiry and research.

Key characteristics of the AWRIS architecture

• Service Oriented Architecture – information will be accessed via the web, providing real-time access to distributed data sources.
• Browser tools (client tier) – will enable the end-user to access data and information through browser tools, including search and display mechanisms.
• Application tools (application tier) – server side tools components that are specific for the AWRIS toolset (mapping services, report tools etc).
• Infrastructure (enabling framework) – infrastructure components that enable the upload and register of (meta-) data, or have metadata harvests and including spatially and temporally-enabled catalogue of registered services. This framework allows custodians of water information (data contributors) to make their data available for sharing via standards-based web services.
• Contributor tools (contributor tier) – services that allow those who are providing data and information to be able to do so.