The Ecology Data Bank (EDB) will act as the central repository for ecological information for the Homebush Site, which includes the Olympic Precinct and adjacent Millennium Parklands. The aim of the EDB is to provide a variety of users including the general public and site managers with access to historic and contemporary site data, both spatial and textual, totalling some 90GB.
Users within the Ecology Program will access the EDB in a number of ways. The most common way will be via an Intranet application that gives end-users the ability to search and retrieve via a map-based and or text-based graphical user interface (GUI). For example, an aspatial (text based) search may be instigated by the end-user entering keywords into the Intranet GUI. The EDB will initiate a search on the document and spatial metadata stores to look for references in the EDB that match the keyword(s) entered. Once found, the data may be presented to the end-user as a document, dataset, image or map.
Sinclair Knight Merz designed and developed a SQL Server database to hold data for all existing data sets and to allow the entry of new records including Metadata. These data sets are made available to the Enterprise, and ultimately the public, via a web site developed with Allaire's ColdFusion. Spatial functionality has been added using ESRI's ArcSDE for Spatial data storage and ESRI's ArcIMS for enterprise wide spatial data access.