Overview

Aim

The aim of Open Geotechnical Data is to free up data used in the ground investigation and geotechnical asset management industry, allowing the data to be used more widely, effectively and efficiently. The increasing use and expectation of web and mobile platforms to display, edit and capture data has raised the requirement for modern file formats to enable easy access to applications through apis that are often exposed in Pyhon, Javascript etc.

Background

Data and information is passed through the supply chain in a variety of formats including: Spreadsheets, electronic documents, AGS, CAD drawings, and GIS. The mixture of file formats makes handling and sharing the data difficult, often resulting in re-keying information. Whilst the AGS data format has made significant advances in setting out the requirements and improved use of transfer of site investigation data, it invariably results in the need for specialist software to make effective use of the data. This software is mostly written for the Windows OS. There are no publicly available, open source libraries to help transform the data, so each organisation either has to procure proprietry software, or spend time and money re-inventing the wheel. This makes the industry inefficient and is a barrier to ensuring maximum use of the data.

Limitations

This project does not intend to compete with, or replace the AGS data format, it aims to deliver a Swiss army knife of data transformation tools, which support the users of the AGS data format.

The project focuses on the use of data at the points where it is either captured or used, not whilst it is being transferred between organisations. It should be noted that anyone producing or using AGS data format files should comply with the requirements of the Association of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Specialists.

Technology

Some of the tools that this project aims to deliver are:

Conversion tools: AGS to JSON, AGS to YAML, JSON to GeoJSON, AGS data fomat validation, AGS to CSV/Spreadsheet and AGS to SQL

Some of the technologies that are hoped to be supported are: RDBMS, NoSQL datastores, rest, AJAX, HTML5, GIS, Linux, Android, iOS,

The languages supported include:

Python, JAVA, GoLang, Javascript, VB.NET, C# and other high-level languages that have JSON serialisation and deserialisation libraries.