4.1 Soil Profile Datamanagement

Standards and approaches in data management on observations on land and soil

Paul van Genuchten

2023-05-09

History

Various efforts have been made to harmonise Soil Profile data

• GlobalSoilMap
• e-SOTER
• ISO28258
• GLOSIS Web ontology

e-SOTER

• Relational database model, usually in Microsoft Access

• Kenya

• Southern Africa

• Senegal and Gambia

KEN-SOTER

KEN SOTER map

KEN SOTER model

ISO28258

• ISO28258 is based on Observations and measurements
• every field observation and laboratory analysis as a sensor observation

O&M model

ISO28258 in GML

• Serialisation of ISO28258 in GML (app schema)

• Quite complex implementation and low support in tooling

• INSPIRE Soil (Europe)
  

• ANZSoilML (Australia)

• Alternative is a serialisation in JSON using Sensorthings API.

ISO28258 as relational database

• A relational model is available according to ISO28258
• Either as PostGreSQL or GeoPackage (SQLite)
• Read more at https://iso28258.isric.org

GLOSIS Web Ontology

• GLOSIS Web Ontology has expressed ISO28258 using common web ontologys (SOSA, VCARD)
• Includes codelists for soil properties and procedures

Harmonisation of field, lab and legacy data

• Use common codelists to identify properties, methods, units
• Hale Studio and FME are tools for data harmonisation
• Also SQL scripts are often used to harmonise data
• Semantic web community offers harmonisation tools (rml, tarql, csv-ld)