Towards Service-Oriented Geoscience: SEE Grid and APAC Grid

Open geospatial standards, service-oriented architectures (SOA) and grid computing enable new approaches to publishing and accessing geoscience data and programs. The linkages between three collaborating projects show how the use of standards based service interfaces and protocols is enhancing the capabilities of geoscientists. The first of these projects, “The Solid Earth and Environment Grid (SEE Grid) Roadshow 2005” demonstrates how open geospatial standards can be used to provide interoperable access to Government geoscience data held at all Australian geological surveys. The “Australian Partnership for Advance Computing (APAC) Grid Geosciences” project illustrates how computationally demanding geoscience programs can be made available as services and distributed across the APAC partners HPC and storage resources in a manner that requires limited knowledge of the physical infrastructure. Finally, the “predictive minerals discovery CRC (pmd*CRC) project” shows how these services can be chained to provide advanced modelling and interactive inversion of mineralization processes for the purposes of improved exploration targeting.