On the 18th June 2008 the Association of Geotechnical Specialists (AGS) and the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) will present "Electronic Transmission and Storage of Data – Site Investigation to Piling" The National Motorcycle Museum, Birmingham, UK.

This international event will showcase DIGGS and how the AGS continue to support its development, and will include four sessions as detailed below all of which have relevance to a DIGGS practitioner.

DIGGS is pleased to report the successful completion its first US Environmental SIG meeting in New Orleans on the 13th March 2008. The aim of the day was to introduce the structure and principles of the DIGGS group and how the DIGGS format will meet the needs of the environmental community.

Presentations were made by Kim Stagg and Roger Chandler. These presentations can be downloaded here.

Over the last 12 months I have been testing the schemas by creating example files. I can now create them quite quickly using a program called Oxygen, but I know how daunting it can appear when you get started, especially if you start by looking at the schema files!

After version 0.9.2 DIGGSML was split into several parts to aid its development and there have been some problems with using the schemas in various different parsers, many stemming from the xsi:schemaLocation attribute and it's varied implementation.

This article explains reasons behind the move from relative paths to canonical URI's and how to use the included catalog file to tell your parser where to find your local copy of the schemas.

After Monitoring and the SamplingPoint object - Part 3 we had reviewed various methods of encoding blocks of tabular data in XML and identified a number of previous implementations of this construct (WITSML, SensorML).

This article details how DIGGSML builds on the implementations in WITSML and SensorML and implements a generic Table structure for storing lots of repeating Monitoring data.

DIGGSML is an international standard, and since many people all over the world speak different languages DIGGSML must respect this. Whilst the element names themselves are in "international English" their content can often be in one (or more) different languages.

This article will explain the best practices for internationalising a DIGGSML file, including how to implement a bi-lingual file.

After Monitoring and the SamplingPoint object - Part 2 we left the Monitoring section of DIGGSML in a workable state.

There is however a problem associated with this method, it's verbosity, adding a large amount of data will rapidly produce a prohibitively large file.

This article details how this problem arises and two possible solutions, using a space separated lists of values, and using a tabular system proposed by John Bobbitt of the Petrochemical Open Standards Consortium (POSC) as well as taking looking at the OGC's standard for this type of data, SensorML.