This work package aims to design the technical architecture that will enable the partner institutions to provide visibility to the metadata on georesources in Africa and, when possible, a controlled access to the data sets. This workshop was hosted by the Geological Survey Department of Ghana, and jointly organised by the Czech Geological Survey and the Geological Survey of Ethiopia (GSE).

The purpose of this workshop was to:

• Inventory reference documents, existing standards, legislation;

• Define technical architecture: required system functionality; strategy, principles and global scheme for a distributed architecture; dataflow specification and discussion of technological levels;
• Define the technical infrastructure: proposals for hardware and software components; processing, management and delivery of geological data; risks and dependencies, security, reliability of the system.

Three working group sessions were organised on “Proposals for hardware and software components”, “Processing, management and delivery of geodata”, and “Risks and dependencies, security, reliability of the system”.

Attention was drawn to the need for a unified technical terminology that could be used by the AEGOS work packages, and an introduction to a technical glossary was given.

The importance of multilingual operation within the AEGOS technical architecture was pointed out. At present, English is the first language used but the results and interface should also be operational into French and Portuguese. Arabic was also mentioned as an important language in the future. Workshop participants recognized the value of the experience gained in projects like eEarth, eWater, Geomind and OneGeology in Europe that could be used as an example for the multilingual operation of the AEGOS system. Attention was drawn to the UNESCO Multilingual Geoscience Thesaurus, which is being used for managing the PANGIS Bibliographic database.

It was requested to estimate the cost of the proposed Technical Infrastructure for the future AEGOS implementation (Phase 2) and identify different on-going ICT initiatives in Africa.

Regarding the requirements for system functionality, the participants agreed that the sustainable collection and preservation of the data concerning georesources is under the responsibility of each individual partner institution as being the actual custodian of the data. Access to the metadata will be public, whereas the access to the data sets will be controlled by the data producers depending on their respective data sharing policy.

The key stages that will enable them to provide a standardised access are as follows:

• Through seminars and training proposed by the work package in charge of capacity building, AEGOS will advise national partners how to reach the technological and knowledge baselines;
• AEGOS will provide guidelines to national partners for standardising and disseminating their metadata and data.

The main conclusions are:

• AEGOS architecture should be web-services oriented (SOA);
• Metadata should comply with OGC CS-W 2.0.2 (Metadata service);
• Data will be accessed as OGC web services;
• Architecture will be based on Nodes at data producers level with different levels of infrastructure;
• One Full (Portal) Node is required as the entry point for end-users;
• The Full (Portal) Node identifies the data sources and redirects users to the appropriate nodes.

D. CAPOVA (CzechGS, Czech Republic)
S. AYELE (GSE, Ethiopia)
Work package 2 co-leaders