ENVASSO Soil Database (SoDa)
Report of the project:
The cross-border description of soil condition status and change requires the availability of harmonised and comparable soil data. In Europe, data sources and database management are extremely heterogeneous. Up to now, international soil databases are usually static: repeated assessments of the soil condition are not yet accessible, and the existing soil profile and analytical data are mostly derived from a wide range of sampling dates often connected to the progress in soil mapping. Building on experience within the European Soil Bureau Network, data delivered by national or regional data centres are centrally stored and lack further updating. Data harmonisation before or during data delivery as well as adjusting the data structures to reporting formats is time consuming and has to be repeated for each data request.
Soil database working menu
Source: BGR
INSPIRE and the idea of subsidiarity call for distributed data management on the level of data producers. To enable the ENVASSO pilot area partners to manage their data on their own systems and provide up-to-date datasets for soil monitoring indicator calculation, a database structure has been developed that integrates profile and analytical data (Soil Database - SoDa). This structure allows to store, query and communicate data that were obtained according to various survey guidelines, with varying analytical methods and is classified according to diverse classification systems. It includes meta information on all parameters that is necessary e.g. for quality assessment of calculation results. Data from repeated measurements or data for the same parameter obtained with different methods for the same location can be stored.
Soil database import form
Source: BGR
SoDa provides robust import procedures basing on simple tables for profile and analytical data. Each user can easily introduce new parameters, with or without pre-defined parameter value lists, without changing the data model. The structure fully meets the requirements of a profile database for map units according to the Manual of Procedures.
The database structure has been implemented in MS Access and is currently tested in some pilot areas of ENVASSO. Data can be communicated via a XML export interface to other databases even when running on different database management systems.