On the morning of Wednesday 21 November, Dr. Rob Baxter will give the following talk in the session entitled, “Engagement, involvement and facilitation”.

“The Automated Data (Layer) Harvester – Adding scalability to the NBN system” – The NBN Atlas has a need to be updated manually every time a provider of a spatial data layer makes changes to a layer. Administrators of an NBN Atlas need to be aware of any changes to any layers, then download the layer from the provider’s website. The administrator then needs to upload the new layer to their Atlas server; manually insert the layer, perform spatial intersections calculations, then make the new layer “live” for people to use.

EPCC and NBN (along with Scottish Natural Heritage and SEPA as additional stakeholders), have been working on a project, to provide an Automated Data (Layer) Harvester for the NBN Scotland Atlas. This software checks for changes in a provider’s layer by using the Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure portal; this automatically pulls the data layer into the Atlas and uploads it, ready for an administrator to perform intersections with species data. This talk will present our work to date, and also talk about how we wish to expand it in the future, to allow the NBN Atlas to grow with addition of predative data analytics.

This project was funded by the University of Edinburgh’s Data Engineering Programme at EPCC.

EPCC is the University of Edinburgh’s high-performance computing centre; specialising in super-computing, data analytics and software engineering. EPCC is the largest high-performance computing centre in the UK and aims to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.

Dr. Rob Baxter, is Group Manager at EPCC, the University of Edinburgh.

Dr Rob Baxter
Dr. Rob Baxter