 activity. Thanks Melanie to see the recording switched on then. So diving into today's activity we've really been motivated by a number of different things. The first aspect of motivation was, excuse me, back at e-research 2019 in Brisbane, a number of us held a and participated in birds of a feather activity up there looking at spatial services across the country. And it was very evident back in October, November last year, as we're having discussions around spatial services, the space, the Australia's geospatial data and services landscape is really changing quite rapidly with a number of different new capabilities, updated programs, essentially that's funding programs or government programs, and responsibilities or remits associated with those programs. And what was becoming apparent was that people really were unsure about what were some of the communication technologies that are going on, were they being adopted at different levels to actually facilitate the flow of data between services in this landscape, but more so where were these actual services that are out there? So the motivation for today and the question we're looking to answer in today's community practice what is principally what geospatial meta data services are available and where? Now this question is rather broad and I've seen in some of the mirror board stuff coming on there already at the moment that this is a really huge space and we're very aware of that. So we're going to try and break this down in a little bit over the next couple of slides. So the aim of today is to actually try and start creating a picture of Australia's geospatial data and services landscape. Now when I say start, we're going to have an initial mapping exercise which is what we're doing today which is having a bit of a play, creating a bit of a mud map so to speak to really start to put some of these different services and different data stores or whatever it may be in an environment and start to get people thinking about what's actually out there and what are some of the connections between these different objects similar to how we're maybe out there surveying or mapping a landscape we're actually going to do it in the digital world to actually think about well what's available and how do we connect to it. The second step of this which we won't actually cover in today's meeting but we're actually doing a future meeting is to actually try and start to flesh things out a little bit more. This may actually be setting up a working group around this activity or it may invite people who are champions or leaders in this space to actually comment on different aspects here whether it's from OGC or whether it's from Geoscience Australia to help us to start to to understand the landscape and how it may actually make the connections between different things. There are a number of different existing groups that are out there at the moment to actually facilitate these connections whether we're looking at metadata or whether looking at the communication side of things. So there's a huge amount of resources that are currently available so in the community of practice space we're really trying to develop a community around this landscape to actually try and make connections within this area. So to get things started today we thought we might start off with a very simple example. So my name is Michael, Michael Rigby from Oren and I thought what I'd do is provide a bit of a presentation on what Oren looks like and how he might consider I guess the spatial components of Oren but more so the data and services landscape from my perspective. Now at Oren we might consider a number of different objects say the Australian Bureau of Statistics and data.gov.au and how Oren as an object or an entity really would connect between these. So Oren would consume data from the ABS and try and make it available to its users in different ways. It then would feed that information back the metadata side of thing and the data itself out via data.gov.au as an example. Now this is a very simple I guess service chain and we can actually start to break this down a little bit more detail. So here we're looking at obviously objects and the relations between them. In this case we've obviously got directed relationships here and in some cases whether it's metadata or data whatever it may be things may look a little bit different. On the object side of things we actually may have organizations very high level say ABS Oren or data.gov.au. These objects obviously depend on the actual person's perspective maybe you define at different levels but specifically within these we're very much interested in four main parts that being a data store, the data itself, metadata and say a metadata registry. The relationships between these objects within an organization may then be the data or the metadata connections between these and as I said before these are often directed so whether data is being updated or harvested there is a particular flow of information between these entities. Now for those obviously in the zero spatial world or particular areas of expertise we can think of a whole bunch of different applications which are drawn up of different technologies within this space touched on a few already and a few of these are actually core components of a number of these different organizations when it comes to serving out spatial data or metadata and we'll come to these a little bit later on. So I guess in the back of our minds we do have I guess a simple view of the landscape and looking at organizations very high level and as we dive down into the detail suddenly you know things may get a little bit more granular. So if we were to look at these two objects the Australian Bureau of Statistics and data.gov.au and look at Oren here I've just zoomed in a little bit here into Oren with the with the mindset to take these different connections and think about how does Oren actually connect to the ABS and how does it then sort of feed its metadata around to data.gov.au to actually facilitate the use of data and metadata in different ways. Now with an Oren we do have a number of different geo server instances and if we're consuming data from ABS this is an example only we may connect to their SDMX endpoint whether that's the older one or the new version 2.1 doesn't matter and we actually may connect that into the geo server and then within Oren do some sort of manipulations to actually create a version of that dataset whether it's a derived product adding geometry to it whatever it may be and serving that information whether it's metadata or data back out to other entities such as data.gov.au. In the secan example we can think about metadata being harvested from Oren secan as a WMS and metadata records being stored in a metadata repository within secan. Understand that secan is also a data store as well but not going to go into too much detail there. Now this is also the case for geo server we do have a data store on that side as well and that data store obviously is is connecting to the SDMX and feeding things out. Now what happens in the middle well this is up to I guess the another level of I guess of this diagram which I haven't displayed here but I have shown it in the mirror board but really it really depends upon the person the individual's level and perspective on how they're going to challenge this type how they're actually going to approach this task because some people are going to understand the the organization entities quite well other people aren't really going to understand so much what's outside of their organization but more what's going on inside so we're very much aware of that. So to start to to map Australia's geospatial data and services landscape we thought we'd have this mirror board as a collaborative environment and for those who joined the call earlier they've had a bit of a play around with it and we've posted some links in the chat window to actually start engaging with that and within this environment what we'll do is we'll do a quick overview of the mirror and look at how do we start to set up these interactions at different levels and what we're going to do is to actually facilitate discussions we're going to use the zoom breakout feature to actually take the 29 participants who are now on this call and split them out into a number of different groups now people who are assigned a group they may leave a group and join another one but we just wanted to having so many voices on the call we didn't want to throw everybody in into one meeting and have them all talking on top of one another we want to sort of allow people to sort of form their own groups within this space but initially we have to split it out somehow so once we've got got the breakout room set up and we'll do that in the moment we'll then walk through the iron example within the mirror environment and get things going there so to get started probably have about five groups of six I think it's probably a good way to get going and we'll set those up right now within the zoom platform and hopefully we'll receive a notification about that occurring and then yes Kiran we might want to walk through the or an example on mirror before we break going to breakout groups sure okay all right well they'll jump over into mirror and let's have a look there so for those who have come in recently the mirror link we've just posted in the chat window in mirror as I said before is a collaborative environment to actually explore a number of different spaces and within the mirror environment you'll see a number what we call like pages or sections and by zooming and panning you'll actually see these sections but we'll actually switch over to the mirror environment now and I'll see you there soon you'll recognise me by my pointer otherwise feel free to add some questions in the chat window touch base in about 30 seconds and if anyone's having trouble with mirror you just want to put a note on the chat and we'll try and help you with it okay so over in the mirror world now sounds a bit weird saying the mirror world but mirror world you'll see a number of different sections here the first one being the introduction page and we've kind of covered off that a little bit here we were looking at the different aspects and overall here on the right hand side you'll see a number of different dialogue boxes and things but to start you off with the introduction to the mirror user interface we have a second slide here which actually tells you about how to actually use a mirror now on the top right hand corner you'll see a ways in which we can actually track each of the different users and you can see the curses and you can decide to follow them there's a whole bunch of different guests at the moment which is fine you'll see mine currently hovering over the practice page and on the left hand side here you'll see the actual contact page so if you would like to all follow me what I thought we'd do we just have a quick look at the mirror practice page we've got a first icebreaker activity here which is to actually create a sticky note to introduce yourself for those who've already done this fantastic it's really great to see I am very aware that we've had a number of people who've actually joined the call afterwards so please add a sticky note you'll need to come over here the left hand side and the sticky note is the fourth option down on the left hand side and then draw a sticky note on the page please list your name your organisation and for a bit of fun maybe perhaps a recent book podcast or movie that you found interesting for the for the for those of us that are in lockdown we may have watched probably a little bit too much of Netflix or on-demand SPS whatever it may be I've read lots of books be great to see we've got there once again if you have any questions about the mirror environment feel free to use the zoom chat window at the moment and we'll get into those zoom breakouts once we've gone through this board and if anyone's struggling with using mirror just now be a good time to shout out and sort that out all right for those who have added their sticky note it's really good to see we've got some really good stuff there and everything from well I've just finished watching The Lives of Others really kind of a little bit on the edge sort of stuff around society we've got some really good stuff there and some of the different magazines potentially able to reading yeah great to see some stuff and people getting out and having some different sorts of experiences so with that done hopefully you've got a little bit of an insight into how to use mirror in terms of drawing a sticky note on the page and what I thought I'd do now is I'll just head over to the third board and walk through an example of what we're looking to achieve within this activity today understanding that we have different perspectives some people may be managers and they've got a very high level view of the data and services landscape other people may be technical experts and they know a lot about the organization and it's different capabilities so our intention here is to allow people different ways to engage with activity some people may be really good at maybe saying well data from ABS is shown in data.gov.au I don't know how it's shown but I can draw a connection between the two other people may be like well I know that my organization consumes data from an organization like the ABS does something into that data and pushes that out so that's where I thought I'd start today with an example from Oren so again my name is Michael from Oren I'm the data relationship manager there so in my example today I thought we'd just show a very simple example of this data and services landscape about how these different connections are being made and if you're all familiar with what Anzlik have done on the FSDF they have a thing called the FSDF link and this link actually provides connections between different things so what we're trying to achieve here in this example but more broadly in the exercise is to a very similar sort of thing but try and capture it in slightly different perspective in terms of looking at those different objects which I presented before on the slides the different objects being the data obviously the data store which may be identified by some a URL or some sort of business identifier the metadata or the metadata registry so in the Oren example I've got here you'll see I've got those three main circles which I presented before ABS Oren and data.gov.du and in this example what I've tried to do is take a particular case study so for those of you who may or may not know the ABS they provide data out via a protocol or technology called SDMX now the SDMX protocol if we come down here and look at the ABS this provides a mechanism to actually slice up a data cube now for Oren that's fantastic because we like to provide that data back to our users in different ways and the actual mechanism to actually interface with the SDMX service at ABS in this example here requires Oren to actually connect via a geoserver into the ABS SDMX endpoint now initially we have to harvest the metadata from a particular data cube understand all the different dimensions of that the actual headers and all that different information to actually populate I guess a schema or a table in our data store and once we've got that structure then we can pull through the actual data from that so in this particular example you'll see two arrows or two relations I've drawn between the ABS and Oren one harvesting the metadata record which is in purple on the right hand side and the other harvesting the data itself in green on the left hand side so once that harvest has occurred oops we then have the data within our geoserver ready to go and we can then start to do things with that now Oren typically deals with geospatial data so the data we actually get from the ABS doesn't have any geometry associated with it so often one of the first tasks we do at Oren is to actually join that data to a corresponding geometry so we can actually display it on the map and do analysis and all that sort of stuff but really in this example here what I've shown is the flows for the metadata side of things so not looking at the geographic boundaries or anything like that that's why I've left the PostgreSQL databases disconnected at the moment so don't worry about that I just wanted to show the flow of metadata after it's been populated in the data store Oren has what they call a metadata tool and this metadata tool harvests the metadata from our geoserver endpoint which ultimately being pulled from the ABS and once we've defined a metadata record within our metadata repository we can then start to then do stuff with the data set ultimately once we have the glue in place we can then start to connect that to Oren's data registry and that's corresponding metadata repository so that we can ultimately flow the data into what we call the Oren portal so we can pull the data and the metadata in and on the other flip side thinking externally we can then update our metadata records in our ccan instance to make sure that the actual metadata itself is discoverable by other organizations so once we've essentially defined and curated a data set by pulling data from the ABS doing some sort of manipulation with it whether we're joining it to geometry or doing some sort of other analysis to create an indicator perhaps we then mean to make that available and sorry findable accessible interoperable reusable or fair for other researchers to come in and access and for that we need to actually make it discoverable so typically what happens here is we then obviously have an endpoint on our ccan which allows metadata to be harvested in this case is the WMS and then data.gov.au can then harvest that into its own metadata repository so quite a bit in that particular example to get started but hopefully that provides a bit of an overview of what we're seeking to achieve here now obviously provide a really technical view of Oren that's because that's my job but other people may actually have their own areas of expertise which would be looked quite differently here obviously seen as someone posting a really good graphic here on the right hand side of this particular page to look at how complex their system is which is fantastic someone's actually I guess engaged with the the example I presented and said well hang on at our company at our organization it's actually a lot more complex than that which is understandable so flipping back to the presentation I get on to what we're actually looking to do today so gone through the mirror introduction and now we're on to the actual collaborative task so once you've had a bit of a look at the example inhabited play with mirror we're now on to the next thing and the fourth slide here you'll see that what I've done is I've created four key reference points now from a spatial perspective this makes sense we've got reference points whether we're doing georeferencing whatever it may be but here what I thought we start off with was looking at well what are the different aggregators for data I guess more looking at the other end or the sinks of this environment organizations such as data.gov.au, Knowledge Network, Google Data Search or Research Data Australia and how we then might start to hang other organizations from these points now this may seem like a bit of a daunting task but looking back at the Oran example I provided before where I looked at say sucking data out of ABS doing something with it internally at Oran and then allowing creating an endpoint with an Oran to allow that data to be harvested by data.gov.au we can start to build up the relations in this space now very aware that not everybody is going to understand the technical dimensions of this space as well as others but certainly in terms of being able to draw the the key objects that is an organization and the different connections and if I just scroll all the way back to the legend page which is on the on the third slide here we've got a bit of a legend here I typically here on the those who are tracking the legend section here we've got I guess three main objects that being an organization which I've clearly described and we've got within an organization we have an application layer or something which hosts a service now the services I described before where that's a data service a data store metadata service or something like a metadata registry and then we've then got the relationships between these whether that's a flow of metadata or flow of data between these different services now these different objects what I might do is actually create a version of this to share on the main page just so it's a little bit easier to see um for those that have to keep scrolling back and forth okay you're done I've just created a copy oh great okay so we can head back over here brilliant thanks Karen um so I've got a legend over here so you can have a look at that and these objects can be drawn by just coming over the toolbar here and whether it's a circle drawing a circle whether it's a square drawing a square don't worry too much about the colors or anything like that we're just trying to at least start to draw um this landscape ourselves so from this point in the presentation we're now moving into a period of basically having a go for the next 20 minutes doing some drawing on this space and really starting to I guess make some connections between different organizations services or applications in this area to facilitate the flow of metadata or data between different groups so Karen have we set up the zoom breakout rooms as yet um Melanie Melanie was doing that and we're going to set it up into four different groups so that we should be roughly about six people uh the group brilliant okay so I can see some really interesting people already started with their organizations which is fantastic um but to actually help the actual conversation piece so people aren't just in a silent bubble we'd have these zoom breakout rooms to allow some coordination communication so for those who have started already fantastic for those who are a bit unsure of what to do feel free to use the chat window or use the breakout rooms which we're trying to get up behind the scenes at the moment or if you have any questions feel free to turn your microphone on and just ask at the moment if you got really stumped and not too sure how to work things um hopefully you received a breakout room invitation now so off to breakout room three and we'll touch space with you um over the course of the next 20 minutes and we start to draw some of these objects in the mirror space um just try and start to map the data and services landscape and I'll also mention that um Karen and Melanie will also be doing the tours around to make sure we're um we're okay with the task and if there are any questions in those breakout rooms I'm feel free to ask and um we'll try and get around to you all otherwise um you have fun should be really good activity so um this is the start of just this mud map exercise to really start to think about what are the connections and how it can start to get this information recorded so welcome back everybody some people are still playing around in the mirror world hopefully you've been enjoying this particular activity I'm just going to give people another minute or two to find their way back here so welcome back everybody back into the the zoom world from our mirror world um hopefully enjoy that activity um it was interesting obviously to see a number of different things coming on um and other people are still playing around there which is great to see um a really big task obviously to uh to start this but I think today really was great to start thinking about this from a mud mapping perspective to say what are the different the key actors in this space and how would they actually how do they currently interact but also how might they interact in the future um what are the different opportunities that are here um I guess there's from from my breakout group um there is particularly an opportunity for learning a huge opportunity for learning to say well okay oh you're drawing data from over there and using that technology um how might I might start to think about bringing that into my organization or what are the different capabilities that I might look at all these sorts of different questions um or what are some of the other different value ads that may exist in this space which I might not have thought about or which I thought about but I'm actually now starting to think about more more so so looking more broadly at the um I guess the overall task we set today did anybody like to comment at all on the activity um what they found worked well what hasn't worked well um we just got a couple minutes for basic feedback at the moment um and then what we'll look at then is next steps so opening up the floor um to any comments um around this activity in this space um Peter Walsh from IMS this does a great job of mapping out the infrastructure I've added a couple green boxes to the little section we've been working on that also identifies the governance that's over the top of it which might be a worthwhile addition yeah that looks fantastic I think that extra layer um on top of that um is very important we look at this um beyond just the technical connections here so anybody else have any um comments or like to talk to any of the work that they've drawn on the board at all um this is Sue Lynn from Oren I just want to say how great um it was to actually network with other people who you wouldn't usually cross paths with and then also visually see the the landscape like it's it's it's quite it's quite um enormous when you come to think of it you know the amount of effort that goes into each of these kind of data maintenance aggregation it's it's almost fed up to like a greater good kind of thing no it's it was a good very good exercise Michael except in Albany Michael I'm just suggesting that maybe we need something in the report that will deal with the acronyms I mean most of us will know most of them but that won't always be the case yeah sure yeah no definitely um particularly even in my old example I started throwing around terms like SDMX and all this stuff there's there's a huge amount of um acronyms that are out there I think I agree that'd be really good if we could actually have the um a repository of those um not thinking about a vocabulary Simon but I'm just thinking more generally I think it'd be a really good asset for everyone anybody else like to discuss um the feelings about the activity or also would like to talk to what they've drawn on the map just a quick comment which is that this is showing what's in place and a lot of that's as a result of significant well resourced activities um I guess there's probably a view of this which is where are the gaps where are the opportunities which um are there and and there are barriers they aren't they aren't happening for for why you know what's the potential uh level of um data sharing and exploitation we should be aiming at yeah it's great some people are still drawing in the mirror world um just great um and uh obviously you know from uh at the moment we're just drawing connections between different things it does look like a lovely bowl of spaghetti with meatballs but um certainly uh this is something that we're going to hopefully continue with in the future so what I'll do is I'll just share my um presentation slides again we've just got I've got one last slide so now we've had a crack at the doing the mud map and starting to even just conceptualize how we do actually even do this exercise um and it's been great to hear some preliminary feedback at the moment it'd be really good to get some more around this um and a number of different questions been coming through in the different groups we'll try and capture that um as we go forward but in terms of future um for those people that are actually really interested in this exercise um we are looking to potentially establish a working group to try and start to flesh things out um what's been drawn on here some people as I said before were technical experts they're able to understand you know their patch and able to put in some of the applications and services which are you know and how they would connect up internally others um are more focused on the organizations about how they're pulling data in from different places and sharing it um but I guess maybe there are some other aspects here um like Rob just mentioned for example google data set search doesn't have any connections on at the moment um that may be an opportunity for some people or maybe something which they may investigate a bit further within their organization to say well hey how do we get on top of that or how do we then work with that um so there are different different ways we can engage with this moving forward so a working group in this space um could actually be a sub subgroup of this community practice which we continue to roll on forward and this could actually be a resource which we maintain whether that's a mirror or whether we extract it out to something more of a combination between spreadsheets without having to fully go to something like rdf or these different sort of approaches um so we do have the opportunity a working group so if you're interested in this um what we'll do is we'll send out an email um to actually allow people to to respond or just send the email back to us via the invitation today saying you're interested in participating in this moving forward and we may have a side group to actually start this map exercise the next thing we have here is opportunity to distribute case studies so as been touched on before there are projects starting up all the time and some of these projects do have well um described architecture diagrams like the one from Loki which Simon contributed to the board um and these projects um may have obviously a number of different connections and whilst they may be short term or long term um these may actually form case studies in this space um prime example ARDC have the latest platforms program or the current one for 2020 but the one before that from 2019 which is fantastic so Oren Oren is involved in that platforms program on the Australian Transport Research Cloud and we may actually end up sort of putting a little note into our diagram here looking at that um and what are the connections between that platform and others we may also consider similar things for um other platform projects in this space um to actually start to think about um what are the different connections here what are the opportunities um all this sort of space so the case study aspect of this map exercise provides an opportunity for connecting it to some of the material you've already created in your projects or your platforms or whatever it may be and contributing that forward and saying well actually here's you know here's a high level architecture or here's something or here's the value of making these connections to really I guess provide I guess a way to start to unpack this um to actually show the value of making these links and connections so um in terms of wrapping up um we're going to have a poll maybe we'll send that out via email um we will have an invitation to update the actual geocat cop items those are the ones items that are on the google google set up at the moment um we also have the working group idea for those people to actually want to continue on with this exercise I know some people are still in the mirror world adding stuff to it at the moment which is really good so there's a lot of enthusiasm for it um and we also have an opportunity um to actually allow other people to contribute other items in this space as well um so um this opening up this space around what is the data and services landscape in Australia um we're hoping to start this conversation so I guess today has been an initial um let's have a go and then we can continue this forward in in different ways so hopefully you enjoyed the the activity today and I've just gone over time so thanks very much for sticking with me um but yep thanks for participating and it's been really good to to see you and um you look forward to look forward to progressing this work into the future so thanks everyone and um I hope you keep safe and