SDI Convergence - Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association

Figure 2: Overview of the system components.
a combination of administrative (local government areas, parishes, catchment management
regions and irrigation regions) and physiographic boundaries (drainage basins)
held the spatial boundary definition required to register almost all natural resource
modelling projects. The major exceptions to this rule in Victoria, Australia being fine
scale modelling in small sub-catchments or studies associated with specific biodiversity
remnants and reserves. With respect to the former there is currently no source of accepted
or formalised boundaries for sub-catchments within the state of Victoria. As the
departmental focus is Agriculture (not biodiversity) for the purpose of the case study it
was deemed that the combination and intersection of all the identified boundary datasets
(excepting those for sub-catchment and biodiversity remnants) would provide an
adequate index to spatially reference modelling projects. This produced an index with
2881 polygonal elements. Each element retained all the attributing from all the contributing
parent boundary datasets. The resultant index provides a spatial matrix enabling
registration of modelling projects by any of the contributing spatial boundary layers.
4.3 Interface design
The interface is constructed to provide both spatially enabled views and the more classic
subject or theme based model discovery services associated with a model register.
Seven tabs are provided at the top of the home page and persist within most of the
tools windows. Apart from the home tab these represent themes or groupings of func-
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