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.

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.

As of Friday 10th August 2007 DIGGSML v0.9 has been released for internal review.

See inside for a comprehensive list of changes and instructions on how to obtain this release.

Roger's earlier article entitled The Importance of AGS Key Fields for Sample Data explained some of the problems involved with transferring sample data in AGS 3.1.

This article will define exactly what is meant by a Sample and a Specimen, how they differ in meaning within DIGGSML and how they relate to each other. This article will explain some of the methods of transferring Sample and Specimen data that were considered for DIGGSML and detail the method finally chosen and the reasons behind its choice.

I will also include some best practices for companies implementing DIGGSML in the real world to help make the use of DIGGSML as productive as possible.

Key Fields play a vital part in the structure of AGS 3.x data. This article shows some of the problems commonly encountered when transferring data in the AGS SAMP and test tables and gives guidence on how to minimise and eliminate these problems.

Keep checking back for the next in this series on sample referencing as we explain how DIGGSML solves these problems soon.

Yesterday I posted a suggestion on how I was thinking of implementing monitoring in DIGGSML, after some consultation we have decided to make some changes! This is a new proposal (which supercedes the previous one), with a much more generic structure. Allowing DIGGSML to cope with monitoring devices and instrumentation that we don't currently use (indeed may not even be manufactured yet!) is very important as it would be impractical to update the framework every time a new instrument was marketed.

This article details a new implementation of Monitoring, allowing DIGGSML to transfer monitoring data for any number of parameters, with any number of readings, for all pre-exisiting instruments and any that may arise in the future.