Background

The AusSeabed program outlines 3 program themes, one of which is the development of a “Data Hub”. 

Geoscience Australia (GA) is the lead organisation of the Data Hub program theme, and this is a primarily infrastructure/systems focused theme. 

The AusSeabed Data Hub is being developed as a multi-component suite of services that are underpinned by a federated data storage model, with each connected data store being referred to as a “contributing hub”. At the time of writing, there are two contributing hubs under development, one at GA and one at CSIRO. 

Outlined below are the different ways of adding data into the AusSeabed Data Hub, and the various policies and processes that are utilised to achieve these connections.

Design

The design of the data hub provides for individual organisations to manage, process and deliver data into federated data stores that are connected by infrastructure provided by Geoscience Australia(GA). Each organisation that hosts their own Contributing Hub, will deliver the data to a consistent standard, and will connect through infrastructure developed and maintained by GA.

GA’s contributing hub has also made the decision to take on custodianship for organisations that are unable to stand up their own contributing hub. Data providers who store their data with GA are called Contributing Data Partners and must be assessed according a number of policies that are outlined on this site.

AusSeabed Contributing Data Partner

A contributing data partner is an organisation that has agreed to assign custodianship for a data product to GA, as an implemented AusSeabed Data Hub. An organisation can becoming a contributing data partner if they:

1. Have, or intend to have, a Bathymetry data product that is not readily available to the public elsewhere that is (or can be):

   1. Available for distribution under an creative commons 4.0 licence

   2. Is within the identified AusSeabed Area of interest (refer to the AusSeabed Strategy)

   3. Can be processed to the AusSeabed standards, as outlined in the multibeam guidelines v2. 

2. Are willing and able to assign custodianship of the data to GA, recognising that all access to the data and its derived products will include appropriate citation. 

3. For data sets that are above a certain size, are willing to contribute financially to the cost of storing and accessing the data, noting that the AusSeabed Data Hub stores and processes the majority of its data from inside managed AWS storage. 

AusSeabed Contributing Hub

AusSeabed is developing all their infrastructure and tools leveraging open and in many cases, freely available technologies and tools. Where licenced services are utilised, as much as possible is also made freely available regarding their configuration and automation within the licence constraints of the tool. As such, an organisation with a significant data store will be fully supported to stand up their own “contributing hub” and connect it through to the other AusSeabed Data Hub components. This will effectively provide seamless services to the end user of the data. 

At its core a contributing hub is:

1. A data store that provides data processed to the AusSeabed standard

2. Connected to the broader AusSeabed Data Hub component infrastructure for seamless delivery to the end user

3. Meaningfully supported from within their own organisation with a forward commitment to continue for at least 12months.

More information about establishing an AusSeabed Contributing Hub can be found here.

Data Submission