Client: Debra Riddell, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

Bio-security for Australia’s primary industries and the broader environment depends upon the ability to launch appropriate response action in the event of a serious incident. Failure to prevent and / or control these incidents could result in billions of dollars lost in export revenues as well as increases in production costs.

The Primary Industries Ministerial Council with the full support of all States, Territories and the Commonwealth has decided to develop a new computer application to be known as BioSIRT (Bio-security, Surveillance, Incident Response and Tracing).  Spatial Vision was contracted to undertake this significant national project.

BioSIRT is used by each jurisdiction for managing emergency and routine incidents of disease, pests or incursions.  The adoption of a single application by all jurisdictions will enable information to be quickly exchanged between jurisdictions to facilitate a coordinated response, especially in an emergency incident. Historically each jurisdiction would have developed its own system leading to national inconsistencies and overall higher development costs.

BioSIRT is a web-based J2EE application which makes use of open standards GIS protocols to maximise interoperability with Jurisdictional GIS systems.  BioSIRT uses a number of open source GIS servers including MapServer and GeoServer to deliver its internal spatial functionality.

BioSIRT version 2 has now been released and to date has been used in a number of trials and minor incidents.  Each of these uses has helped to refine BioSIRT and ensure it will be ready for the next major agricultural disease outbreak.
 

Demonstrated Capabilities

• Application specification and design including national workshops to consult widely across the jurisdictions
• JEE web application development
• Seamless integration of textual and spatial information and functionality
• Use of open standards and open source software components
• Design of solution architecture to interface with widely varying jurisdictional IT and GIS infrastructures
• Integration of proprietary and open source components
• Development of a technical integration strategy with each jurisdiction’s IT and GIS specialists.

 

Technologies Applied

• Java Enterprise Edition supported by best of breed frameworks including Java Server Faces and Hibernate
• Oracle RDBMS, including the use of Oracle Express for low cost field deployments and Oracle Locator for spatial data management
• Open source MapServer and GeoServer for spatial services
• Moxi Media Internet Mapping Framework to provide the fully integrated mapping screens, including web-based spatial data editing
• Crystal Reports Java Reporting Component to provide the reporting framework.