TERN Surveillance is developing a new plot-based survey protocol for the DAWE. The protocol utilises many controlled lists of terms sourced from NVIS and the Australian Soil and Land Survey Field Handbook and stored in a PostgreSQL database as lookup tables.

To maximise data interoperability, the lookup tables used by the new survey protocol will be transformed into SKOS controlled vocabularies. Following Linked Data best practices, the controlled vocabularies will have a persistent and machine-resolvable IRI with basic Dublin Core metadata.

This document explains the data pipeline between TERN Surveillance and TERN Data Services and Analytics (TDSA).

Implementation

A preliminary read-only development version of the web API has been provided by TERN Surveillance to access the PostgreSQL database containing the lookup tables.

Flow

TERN Surveillance provides a REST API for accessing the PostgreSQL database. On a schedule, TDSA utilises Airflow to pull the lookup tables from TERN Surveillance and transforms the values into SKOS controlled vocabularies. The transformed values are validated before ingesting into GraphDB and made available in the AusPlots vocabularies viewer.