How AuScope 3D Geomodels Portal integrates relatively metadata poor geological models into its metadata infrastructure

The AuScope 3D Geomodels Portal is a website designed to display a variety of geological models and associated datasets and information from all over the Australian continent. The models are imported from publicly available sources, namely Australian government geological surveys and research organisations. Often the models come in the form of downloadable file packages designed to be viewed in specialised geological software applications. They usually contain enough information to view the model’s structural geometry, datasets and a minimal amount of geological textual information. Seldom do they contain substantial metadata, often they were created before the term ‘FAIR’ was coined or the importance of metadata had dawned upon many of us. This creates challenges for data providers and aggregators trying to maintain a certain standard of FAIR compliance across all their offerings. How to improve the standard of FAIR compliance of metadata extracted from these models? How to integrate these models into existing metadata infrastructure? For the Geomodels portal, these concerns are alleviated within the automated model transformation software. This software transforms the source file packages into a format suitable for display in a modern WebGL compliant browser. Owing to the nature of the model source files only a very modest amount of metadata can be extracted. Hence other sources of metadata must be introduced. For example, often the dataset provider will publish a downloadable PDF report file or a description on a web page associated with the model. Automated textual analysis is used to extract more information from these sources. At the end of the transformation process, an ISO-compliant metadata record is created for importing into a geonetwork catalogue. The geonetwork catalogue record can be used for integration with other applications. For example, AuScope’s flagship portal, the AuScope Portal displays information, download links and a geospatial footprint of models on a map. The metadata can also be displayed in the Geomodels Portal.