Information Model

The Australian National Soil Information System (ANSIS) aggregates and delivers soil data from governments, research and natural resource management organisations, industry, farmers, and the community. To achieve this, data managed by multiple providers in different ways and for different reasons must be harmonised. A common information model to which the provider data can be mapped is therefore required. This model must be consistent with soil scientists’ understanding of soils and their nationally agreed practices for sampling and describing them.

ANSIS has created a soil domain ontology that adopts updates to the standard Observation and Methods model. It aligns to other environment ontologies, such as the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) and Global Soil Information System (GLOSIS) ontologies. However, it prioritises the representation of soils as understood by the Australian soil community as documented in the Australian Soil and Land Survey Field Handbook, and in standard vocabularies such as the Australian Soil Classification.

• Click here to access the current version of the ontology in testing and development.
• Click here to access the JSON schema in testing and development.
• Click here to access the national standard soil vocabularies that the ontology leverages.

These are maintained at the relevant Australia and New Zealand Soil Data Standards repositories. Questions and feedback can be logged at these repositories. For example, click here access the managed ontology.

ANSIS uses these models to help ensure scientifically robust harmonisation and delivery of consistent data. They support versatile data products that anticipate multiple ways of using the data, including profile reports, GIS layers, or DSM-ready tables of data.