Technical Standards

The ASEG’s Technical Standards Committee is responsible for implementing industry wide standards to aid in data transfer and data quality.

Currently the committee is not active on any projects but members who would like to work towards industry wide standards are invited to contact the ASEG Secretariat.

Some areas which have previously been addressed by the committee:

1. Radiometrics Test Pads.

The objective of this work is to define areas for overflying by radiometric survey aircraft in order to standardise the response of signals recorded in different aircraft using different recording equipment.

Several ranges have been proposed.

2. Data Transfer Standard

ASEG-GDF2 is a meta-standard that provides a flexible method for defining a wide range of data types. This standard has not been finalised as some guidelines are required for the following components:

• Channel naming conventions
• Channel unit specifiers
• Channel descriptions
• Datum and Projection details
• General comment information
• Survey boundary descriptions

A draft of the standard is available here.

Other issues which may be addressed in the future include:

Large data volume encapsulation.

Large high resolution surveys by government agencies are creating file storage requirements in excess of the "tar" standard format capability (~1.4Gb). For some time the use of "tar" has been recommended as a universal file exchange mechanism that is available on both PC and Unix platforms. At present, a large survey must be split into manageable chunks. Recommendations for a new standard needs to be discussed.

Airborne Safety

A number of people have indicated they would like an industry wide approach to geophysical airborne safety standards. Although not a technical standard, this may also be an area which the standards committee may coordinate.