In 2006 the Australian Government announced a new funding initiative, the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). NCRIS aims to provide Australian researchers with access to major research facilities, supporting infrastructure and networks necessary for world-class research. As a component of this strategy, $42.8 million was allocated to the Australian earth science research community to build an integrated national geoscience infrastructure system called AuScope.
Auscope will provide a number of infrastructure components to assist in understanding the structure and evolution of the Australian continent. These include the acquisition of subsurface earth imaging and earth composition and age analysis, a virtual drill core library, geological process simulation, and a high resolution geospatial reference framework.
To draw together information from these new initiatives and from other existing sources in academia, industry and government, AuScope is developing a world-leading geoinformatics network. This Community Earth Model will use open geospatial standards to allow real time access to data, information and knowledge stored in distributed repositories. It will be built on 'end-to-end' science principles whereby there will be access to the highly processed information and knowledge as well as the original raw data and the processing programs used to generate the results.
The key to linking resources in the Community Earth Model will be web service based access to the geoscience information holdings and computational services using common service interface and information models, including the emerging international standard for geoscience information, GeoSciML, and the Australian developed standard for mineral occurrences. The AuScope Portal provides the earth science community with a 'Google-style' interface to the Community Earth Model data and services.