A brief explanation of the Global Soil Information Facilities initiative.

1. Global Soil Information Facilities (GSIF)
T. Hengl, H.I. Reuter, G.B.M. Heuvelink, N. Batjes, J. Leenaars, P. Tempel
Why GSIF? Key principles
Global Soil Information Facilities --- is ISRIC's initiative to build Open (publicly The following general key principles best explain design of GSIF:
available) tools that can be used to enhance collation, harmonization and use
of soil and covariate data to assist production and serving of up-to-date Crowd-sourcing --- Data collection in GSIF is based on crowd-sourcing.
global soil information at high resolution (100 m). This global Soil Information Everyone collecting soil data or working with soil information is invited to
System aims at serving global land use planning and global environmental contribute to some of the databases via data portals. These data will
risk assessment activities. then be reviewed and filtered by an international network of soil
scientists.
Ownership by authors --- Data entered to GSIF data portals will remain
property of the original contributors (copyright holders and/or authors).
FOSS --- GSIF is based on Free and Open Source Software (Linux, PHP,
LaTeX, R, GDAL, GRASS, SAGA GIS, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Python,
Google Earth and similar).
International reference --- Only internationally accepted standards
(International System of Units, international soil classifications systems,
FAO soil field description guides, WGS84, ISO standards) are supported
at the back-end of the system.
Reproducibility --- GSIF is based on automated procedures for mapping,
pattern recognition and report/plots generation. All maps and reports
produced as a part of GSIF are reproducible without human intervention.
Open Access --- All ISRIC-generated soil field records, output maps and
tools used to generate maps will be made publicly available (Open
Fig. 1: Schematic example of using a Global Land Information system for site-specific decision
Access) in near real-time.
making. The future of GSIF is in crowd-sourcing the data input to farmers, agricultural extension Hidden complexity --- Complexity (statistical data processing steps,
workers, high school pupils, ecologists and similar.
coordinate systems, scale, uncertainty in the maps) will be either hidden
from the users or communicated using efficient solutions.
GSIF has been inspired by global environmental data initiatives such as
Global Biodiversity Information Facilities, Global Land Cover mapping,
OneGeology and similar. The main practical reason for GSIF is to build cyber-
infrastructure to collate all existing legacy soil data, currently under threat of
being lost forever (!), and add value to such data by using it for mapping and
modeling purposes.
The main users of GSIF will potentially be various international agencies and
initiatives such as GlobalSoilMap.net and other international agricultural
development and research organizations such as FAO, CIAT, USAID, Inter-
American Development Bank, World Bank. We also aim at National
Environmental and Soil Survey agencies, and private entities and individuals,
soil surveyors and soil scientists, but also farmers and agriculture
engineers.
Fig. 2: Proposed Global Soil Information Facilities components and their relations.
Various GSIF components are being developed by the ISRIC team and
collaborators. The most crucial components of GSIF --- Open Soil Profiles,
Worldgrids, and GSIF R packages will be publicly released by mid 2012.
ISRIC - World Soil Information, Wageningen University
PO Box 353, 6700 AJ Wageningen, the Netherlands
URL: http://www.isric.org
E-mail: {tom.hengl; hannes.reuter; gerard.heuvelink}@wur.nl