IMPLEMENTATION OF A COSMOS FORMAT WEB-BASED GEOTECHNICAL DATABASE FOR THE MIDWESTERN UNITED STATES

ROGERS, J.D., Department of Geological Sciences & Engineering, 125 McNutt Hall, 1870 Miner Circle, University of Missouri-Rolla, Rolla, MO 65409, rogersda@umr.edu.

At the present time there is no over-arching organization of geotechnical data in the Midwestern United States. The St. Louis, Evansville-Henderson, and Charleston urban areas are the focus of the USGS multi-year plan for the Central and Eastern United States (CEUS). There is an acute need to conjoin dissimilar geodata information from these areas, especially those that straddle state lines, because state geological surveys employ different systems of geodata storage, database (db) architecture and db management, much of which remains in hard copy and analog form. The Consortium for Strong-Motion Observation Systems (COSMOS) was established in 1997 by an array of government agencies and private corporations to coordinate establishment of a compatible computerized database that translates digitized geodata into a common output form that can be streamed on-the-fly from various data holders through a webportal, open to subscribers. The COSMOS Geotechnical Virtual Database (GVDB) evolved from the British Association of Geotechnical Societies (AGS) and the National Science Foundation's National Geotechnical Experimentation Sites (NSF-NGES) database architecture. It came online in early 2004 for California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. In early 2006 the Federal Highway Administration will begin implementation of the AGS-COSMOS-XML GVDB in all 50 states, allowing a 12 month comment period before permanent implementation. In the Midwest, this USGS-funded project is aimed at coordinating the implementation of the COSMOS-XML format geotechnical database, employing the COSMOS webportal at the Southern California Earthquake Center.