IAMG 2001--Cancún Technical Program--Session I

Home Page Technical Program Session I Intro Session I Papers

Developing the Canadian Geoscience Knowledge Network: Overcoming Technical, Cultural and Political Challenges by H. John Broome*, Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, Peter Davenport, Geological Survey of Canada, Calgary, Canada, and Eric C. Grunsky, Alberta Geological Survey, Edmonton, Canada Canadian Geological Surveys have been collaborating, since 1998, on development of the Internet-based Canadian Geoscience Knowledge Network, or CGKN (http://cgkn.net). The objective of the CGKN is to link the geoscience knowledge holdings of the 12 federal, provincial, and territorial geological surveys in Canada and to support discovery and access to these data, in consistent and interoperable form. The CGKN will become the geoscience node of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (http://geoconnections.org ) and the Internet portal for Canadian government geoscience data. A CGKN on-line discovery service for geoscience publications has been operational since 1998 (http://cgpd.cgkn.net ) and a project is currently underway to expand this service to encompass all government geoscience data by 2002. The current CGKN vision, development plan, and implementation schedule have evolved incrementally through a combination of national workshops (1998 and 2000), regular federal-provincial teleconferencing, and project funding opportunities. During the design and development of the CGKN, participants continue to encounter technical, political and cultural challenges. The CGKN is being developed on a foundation of international geoscience and geomatics standards. Solutions to technical challenges are rapidly becoming available as Internet data management and access technology becomes more robust, efficient, and affordable. Remaining technical issues include selection of the best technology and standards from a range of options, and working around bandwidth limitations. Policy and cultural challenges are proving more complex. These challenges largely result from issues related to implementation of common services in a community of 12 agencies with diverse technical expertise, different priorities and business plans, and varied resources. Experience to date has shown that key requirements for success are, extensive communication; clearly defined benefits for all participants; a distributed, flexible, and loosely coupled CGKN architecture; and protection of each participant's ability to control the rate and nature of their participation. Canadian geoscience culture is changing as increasing numbers of geoscientists recognize the importance of proper management of both their raw and interpreted data in digital form. We anticipate, as increasing volumes of geoscience data become available in consistent digital form, the improved access and utility resulting from approach will encourage more geoscientists to embrace common standards and digital management of their data. Development of a system that preserves individual geoscientists' close connection with "their" data while simultaneously serving their agency's need to preserve the data and make it accessible in consistent form, is key to the success of the initiative.