BoreholeML - Use cases
(1) Easier data exchange
The interoperability of the borehole information exchange format BoreholeML3 leads to an easier and increased borehole data transfer especially in cross-border projects.
At first, public institutions, e.g. federal and regional authorities, universities and other research facilities, can exchange their borehole data in a standardised way.
Second, BoreholeML allows an easier borehole data exchange between public institutions and private enterprises like consulting engineers and planning agencies. As a result tasks in various fields, e.g. structural and civil engineering, city and regional planning, land-use planning, soil conservation, water protection, agriculture and forestry, are performed more effectively.
Further, it is expected that planning agencies working in different countries or cross-border projects will gain time by analysing borehole data. This will be enforced when companies developing application software for borehole data will enhance their software to support the BoreholeML standard like it is intended in the actual project.
(2) Portals using borehole data / eEarth Client
The eEarth web portal [12] leads the user to the national internet-clients for accessing borehole data. The German eEarth-Client is called borehole viewer Germany (Bohrpunktkarte Deutschland) [13], which provides a full featured WebGIS-Interface usable with a common internet browser. This application is designed as a national access point with its own metadata database for descriptive information about the boreholes.
The recent client already fulfils four main purposes to present and offer borehole data (use cases):
- The publication of borehole locations based on topographic maps in an interactive WebGIS-Client
- A search engine to identify boreholes via geographical search or text search by attribute
- An opportunity for ordering additional data of the selected borehole location by e-mail contact (no direct view yet except for data from Lower Saxony)
- Multilingual support
Use cases in the eEarth-client
The figure gives a summarized overview on the user interaction possibilities with the actual client. The different search options are one of the major system components, enabling precise filtering of vast amount of data. All requests are done very shortly because of database tuning. Its easy to filter boreholes via header data and availability of strata and technical data.
In the near future (2011) a direct delivery of BoreholeML3 borehole data via an OGC compliant Web Feature Service provided by the SGD will be put into operation. Further, geo- and software engineering companies are closely involved in the project to realise and implement the technical part in existing and popular software products for borehole data management. So it is expected to establish an industry standard with BoreholeML3. As a result the modified eEarth-Client will be the first full featured prototype to demonstrate the functionality of BoreholeML3 and make borehole data easily accessible for the public domain.
The BoreholeML-model is designed to be flexible with the possibility to add further detailed information just by connecting them to the header class when needed for further development. This also applies to the underlying codelists to determine the semantic content for the given attributes. These codelists are put together into a dictionary which is extensible without any structural modification of the model.