Overview of the WOSSAC Project
BackgroundImportance of Wossac
Programme of Work
Storage facilities
Longer term developments
Publicising WOSSAC
WOSSAC in use - case studies
WOSSAC research
WOSSAC Metadata Standards - adopted archive standards
First commenced in January, 2004, Cranfield University's 'World Soil Survey Archive and Catalogue' (WOSSAC) project aims to develop an archive and catalogue of all substantial soil surveys, reports and maps made overseas, with particular reference to those by British companies and personnel, to provide a safe repository for endangered copies, and to make the accrued information widely available for consultation by interested parties.
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| Download the WOSSAC Poster | Download the WOSSAC Presentation |
Background
Large numbers of substantial soil surveys have been made worldwide by British companies over the past 80 years, mainly funded by governments as well as development assistance donors, representing over 250 territories. A rough estimate, almost certainly on the low side, is that such surveys number many tens of thousands and by today's prices would cost many hundreds of million pounds sterling to repeat! So expensive would this prove that in truth such surveys are never likely to be undertaken again; yet until WOSSAC, many of these unique materials were scattered, unprotected and in danger of being lost forever. The WOSSAC Archive represents an extremely valuable bank of international data about soils, their nature, properties and potential use of land, made ever more important by the pressing needs of the developing world as never before. Many of the 8 items of the UN Millennium development goals can be directly related to and informed by the contents of the WOSSAC archive.
This large body of information about world soils has been in grave danger of becoming lost, destroyed or generally unavailable as the original donor funding agencies have been subject to reorganisation, and the companies that produced the surveys have been acquired, merged, downsized or closed down, and with many of the original the soil surveyors themselves being now retiring or deceased.
Before WOSSAC, there was no organised resource-base detailing what exists, in what state or how available it is. Therefore at the behest of the British Society of Soil Sciences (BSSS) and with the full support of the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) and the Tropical Agriculture Association (TAA), the National Soil Resources Institute (NSRI) located at Cranfield University has undertaken to catalogue, archive and manage this important body of information and to make it widely available to the stakeholder community. There are currently many tens of thousands of volumes of reports and maps in store in the process of being classified and archived. A huge proportion of the collection has already been catalogued and these items may be searched using the tools on this website. Work is ongoing to complete the cataloguing process, and to make the materials themselves available in electronic form using the Internet.
TopImportance of Wossac
Why is soil survey information in Wossac important and why does it warrant conservation and dissemination?
Firstly, many of the more disadvantaged and distressed peoples in Africa and elsewhere in the LDC's depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and for their lives. Some of the problems they face are unavoidable but are exacerbated by mismanagement of their soils. Improved soil management can contribute substantially to increasing agricultural production and improving rural welfare. However effective technical intervention requires understanding of the types and distributions of the soils involved.
Secondly, one of the ways in which CO2 emissions can be offset is by increased carbon sequestration in soils. As loss of organic matter is one of the main causes of soil degradation in the tropics, modifying soil management to increase organic matter contents has the dual benefits of withdrawing carbon from the atmosphere and also improving soil productivity. However, once again, choosing the right interventions depends on knowledge of the types of soils and their distributions.
It is therefore important to have as much information as possible on the soils of Africa and other LDC's. Fortunately, the Wossac archive contains a considerable body of such knowledge in the form of soil survey reports and maps undertaken by British projects, companies and surveyors in the past 50 years or so. Many of these were initiated by DfID and its predecessors, and therefore paid for by the UK taxpayer. It is estimated that to redo these surveys would cost substantially more than a hundred millions pounds at present rates, and might be impossible, because the skilled personnel have died, retired or moved onto other work, and they have not been replaced.
Because many of the basic properties of soils are relatively immutable over the medium term, soils data tend to have a long shelf life and soil surveys done 40-50 years ago are still valid and valuable today. Indeed contemporary remote sensing techniques and approaches such as digital soil mapping rely on legacy data for ground truthing and validation - without the contents of archives such as WOSSAC these datasets are often very hard to locate.
TopProgramme of Work
The WOSSAC programme of work to date has included the following:
- Contact with organisations and individuals regarding report holdings as part of an intensive campaign to identify all soil reports and maps that have been made, and to meet with all principal stakeholders.
- Organise the current holdings of reports, surveys and maps. This involves determining methods of cataloguing and archiving to be used and ensuring that they are as consistent with other catalogues, collections and international methodologies as possible. It will be necessary to decide how to link with catalogues and archives of reports and maps already existing in Company and National libraries.
- Establish an on-line database and catalogue of all known surveys as well as a physical catalogue and project web presence.
- Establish a mechanism for visitors to the collection to consult reports and maps and publish the availability of this service as widely as possible.
Work
now underway focusses upon identifying the best means to promote the widest
use of and access to the WOSSAC archive. A number of promising technical
opportunities present to ensure the collection is revealed to the widest
audience. One such example is the prototype placement of WOSSAC materials
within the phenomenal 'Google Earth' project (see News section),
and investigations as to using OGC-compliant web-based services such as WMS/WFS
to reveal the actual data contents of the archive. There are tens of thousands
of maps from all over the world and thousands again of the reports associated
with the soil surveys conducted. The process therefore of digitising and
scanning the collection remains a major and significant task that will
require significant funding.
Securing such funding must therefore represent an important next step for
the WOSSAC project to enable this next important phase in the ongoing development
of the archive. See here for
details as to how to support the Wossac project.
Another important focus looking forward will be the task of aligning the WOSSAC collection to other major significant and important collections of soil and soil-related surveys worldwide, such as those of EUDASM, ISRIC, IRD, FAO and USDA.
TopStorage facilities
WOSSAC holdings are kept within the Cranfield University NSRI Archive facility which has a controlled temperature and humidity environment, making it highly suitable for the long term storage of the thousands of paper, film and magnetic-based catalogue items. The WOSSAC collection also incorporates a vast number of magnetic tapes (over 7,500), storing on them spaceborne imagery captured since the very first satellite observations were taken. These tapes come from the former National Remote Sensing Centre, of which Silsoe was a part, and the tapes are awating transferral to comtemporary digital storage media. These tapes sit alongside up to 5,000 further tapes from the HTSPE collection making the overall collection extremely significant.
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Longer Term Developments
Significant archives of soil survey reports stimulated by other countries exist within the collections of other organisations in Europe and the USA; in particular the collections of the EU's JRC, ISRIC in the Netherlands, IRD and BRGM's InfoSOL in France and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). A key aim of WOSSAC is to develop linkages with these other world databases to create a World Database of Soil Surveys. To achieve this aim funding is being sought from the major funding agencies to support the ongoing development of WOSSAC and to establish its links with other such major databases.
TopPublicising WOSSAC
It is very important to draw the WOSSAC project to the attention of the soil science community. We would welcome any assistance in this matter that can be offered. One practical means to achieve this is to print off copies of the WOSSAC poster and to display them. also, if there are individuals or organisations who you think would be interested in our work - please let us (wossac@cranfield.ac.uk), or them know.
TopWOSSAC in Use
The WOSSAC Archive can be of enormous assistance for a range of applications and activities, from national and regional strategic land planning, to managing development and relief efforts, to the conduct of academic research. WOSSAC contains a huge wealth of unique reports, maps, manuscripts, photographs and albums covering scores of countries around the world over a period of many decades. The following examples give an idea of how the WOSSAC archive is being used to further development aid, relief work and research:
"The WOSSAC collection at Cranfield University has been an invaluable resource during my research on water management in South Western Uganda. I have been able to access both topographical maps of the area I was studying, as well as soil maps which were difficult to obtain in Uganda. As South Western Uganda is a little-studied region the maps at WOSSAC were a vital resource enabling me to gain an in-depth knowledge of the terrain which would have been impossible without them. The staff and researchers at WOSSAC were extremely helpful and I will undoubtedly consult the WOSSAC collection during any future research projects."
"I was awarded the position of Soil Salinity and Improvement specialist on the ADB Earthquake and Tsunami Emergency Support Project in Banda Aceh with the brief of assessing the salinity situation post-tsunami and coming up with remedial strategies to help get agriculture back on stream. What was evident from the start was that, since the Aceh area had been closed to the outside world for about 20 years due to the rebel activity, there was a serious lack of available historic material to use as background.
The frustrating thing was that I knew that there was a wealth of data somewhere but locally no-one knew anything about, or would admit to knowing about, previous studies. A basic search on Wossac revealed that a very large base of material did exist and it was then a case of working out just what might prove useful. Anyway, with the help of the WOSSAC team at Cranfield I was able to narrow down the search a good deal and managed to extract some critical summary information from the Aceh Design Unit documents which fully supported my own suspicions and deductions, adding to my assumptions made using what little new data that did exist together with a few quick field trips.
What I needed was confirmation that "there was a known risk of drainage problems" and that the dreaded "aluminium / acidity problem" existed. Wossac was able to supply this confirmation and that made my negotiations with and persuasion of the local experts that much simpler and eventually I got people believing me that there was a chronic, low level salinity problem which would not go away because the drainage systems were all blocked or non-functioning. The danger of acidification as the soils were dried out was also then built in to the expected outputs that I had to make."
"A critical part of my Master's thesis research involved the collection of original National Soil Map and Land Use Project documentation on-site in Jordan. This documentation was necessary for an in-depth understanding of the project, and therefore for the success of my thesis and the recovery of the project data.
Having found this documentation listed on the WOSSAC website, I made a request to the organisation for access to the documents. The assistance of WOSSAC in helping me to acquire official and legal access to the documents in digital form was invaluable.
It is clear to me that the services provided by WOSSAC have the potential to secure extremely costly data from loss, and thereby to ensure that the intended benefits of soil studies are realised. This is especially the case for studies in less developed countries where the data storage infrastructure and data maintenance may be unsuited for the long term storing of large quantities of data.
These services are extremely important for academics, researchers, development organisation, and ultimately for those people living in studied areas. WOSSAC therefore offers a excellent example or model for data security and sharing and is clearly the most important Internet resources for soil survey data."
WOSSAC Research
WOSSAC has formed the subject of several Postgraduate research projects at Cranfield University. Links to relevant Masters degree theses are provided below:
Hunt, James. (2003) Design of the World Soil Survey Archive and Catalogue (WOSSAC).
Kaoyanagi, Yuki. (2005) Proposal for a new metadata schema for world soils survey archive and catalogue (WOSSAC)
Alias, Guillermo. (2006) Investigation into the use of the Google Earth mapping platform for presenting a World Soil Survey Archive and Catalogue (WOSSAC)
Owonibi, Michael. (2007) The Development of a Prototype Soils Archive Information System to Publish World Soil Data and Metadata (WOSSAC) Holdings, Using Proprietary and Open (Public) Standards
WOSSAC Metadata Standards
To document and catalogue the items in WOSSAC, various standards are adhered to, for consistency within the archive, and for interoperability with wider archiving initiatives. The catalogue metadata schema is based upon the internationally-recognised Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) standard MARC21. This system allows for documents and artifacts to be recorded using a series of structured metadata tags, optimized for storage and retrieval of documentary records. Spatial data within the archive is described using standards based upon the UK GEMINI standard. Derived from the ISO19115 standard, this defines an element set for describing geo-spatial discovery-level metadata. The specific metadata schema adopted is as follows:
| Field | Completion advice |
|---|---|
| Item ID | Unique item identifier - UID |
| ISBN | ISBN number [e.g. ISBN 0-905442-49-0] {MARC 020$a} |
| UDC class number | UDC class number [e.g. 631.41:626.8] {MARC 084$a} |
| Collection Reference | Collection reference [e.g. 604PE_INDUS] - the internal item reference of sub-collections held in WOSSAC {MARC 084$a} |
| Title | Item Title {MARC 245$a} |
| Subtitle | Item Subtitle {MARC 245$b} |
| Language | Language(s) of item [e.g. En for English, Ar for Arabic etc.] {MARC 041$a} |
| Subjects | Subject topics & keywords {MARC 650$a} |
| Series Title | Series title {MARC 440$a} |
| Series Section No. | Series part/section number {MARC 440$n} |
| Series Series Name | Series part/section name {MARC 440$p} |
| Publication Year | Publication created (full year only) [e.g. 1966] {MARC 260$c} |
| Publisher Name | Publication publishers name [e.g. An Foras Taluntais] {MARC 260$b} |
| Publication Place | Publication publishers place [e.g. Dublin] {MARC 260$a} |
| Project Sponsor | Original project sponsor [e.g. UNDP] {MARC 710$a} |
| Corporate Author Series | Corporate author series [e.g. An Foras Taluntais] {MARC 110$a} |
| Personal Author | Personal author [e.g. Smith, D] {MARC 100$a} |
| Material Extent | The number of pages, volumes etc., of the described item {MARC 300$a} |
| Material Characteristic | Other physical characteristics such as illustrative matter {MARC 300$b} |
| Material Accompanying | Accompanying material, may include a parenthetical physical description of the accompanying material {MARC 300$e} |
| Material Type | Type of unit, terms such as page, volumes, boxes, cu. ft., linear ft., etc. that identify the configuration of the material and how it is stored {MARC 300$f} |
| Summary Abstract | Abstract description summary {MARC 520$a} |
| Country Then | Country name when surveyed [e.g. Ceylon] {MARC 534$n} |
| Country Now | Contemporary country name [e.g. Sri Lanka] {MARC 043$a} |
| Region | Contemporary region/province {MARC 052$b} |
| Major City | Nearest major city (if on map) [e.g. Mogadishu] {MARC 052$d} |
| Northermost Latitude | Northermost Latitude (decimal degrees) [e.g. 2] {MARC 034$f} |
| Southernmost Latitude | Southernmost Latitude (decimal degrees) [e.g. 1.5] {MARC 034$g} |
| Easternmost Longitude | Easternmost Longitude (decimal degrees) [e.g. 44.833] {MARC 034$e} |
| Westernmost Longitude | Westernmost Longitude (decimal degrees) [e.g. 44.4156] {MARC 034$d} |
| Map Scale | Map Scale (1:x) [e.g. 50000] {MARC 034$b} |
| PDF URL | Filename of PDF scanned file [e.g. 0001.pdf] {MARC 530$u} |
| Access Terms | Comments on stated item access terms |
Another popular archive standard format is the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES). This is a very simple descriptive metadata schema, designed to support the discovery of resources from across a range of domains. It defines fifteen elements to support simple cross-domain resource discovery:
The mapping of the WOSSAC schema to DCMES in its simple/unqualified form is as follows:
| DCMES Element | WOSSAC Element Mapping |
|---|---|
| Title | Title + Subtitle |
| Creator | Corporate Author Series + Personal Author |
| Subject | Subjects |
| Description | Summary Abstract |
| Publisher | Publisher name |
| Contributor | Aquisition Source |
| Date | Publication year |
| Type | Material type |
| Format | Material extent |
| Identifier | ISBN |
| Source | http://www.wossac.com |
| Language | Language |
| Relation | Item Id |
| Coverage | Region + Major City + lat/lon |
| Rights | Access terms |
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