ELVIS – How to Improve Access to Users by 1000%

The Elevation Information System (ELVIS) is Geoscience Australia’s new delivery platform for digital elevation model (DEM) data holdings. This program of work operates under Geoscience Australia's National Location Information Branch. ELVIS incorporates cloud data storage and delivery to provide a cost effective mechanism for serving open data that describes Australia’s landforms and is crucial for addressing issues relating to the impacts of climate change, disaster management, water security, environmental management, urban planning and infrastructure design. This paper outlines the benefits to Geoscience Australia making Elevation data more open, discoverable and freely available by providing a convenient and streamlined clip, zip and ship functionality to users. By combining Amazon Web Services (AWS) for data storage and FME Cloud for data transformation and delivery, Geoscience Australia has succeeded in making its elevation data delivery more convenient for the user and cost effective for the agency. Geoscience Australia, along with Spatial ETL solutions specialist Permuto, has collaborated to automate a new elevation data mapping and delivery service known as ELVIS. Data is delivered using FME Cloud which is hosted on AWS infrastructure. From concept through to production, the system took three months to build, with three people involved in the development effort. By leveraging the Cloud platform, the systems development was able to iterate rapidly with minimal costs for infrastructure. The cloud solution has cut data management and delivery overheads by automating much of the process. The automated delivery system has reduced infrastructure costs by 20%, reduced human resource interaction by 80%, and increased the delivery capability by 1000%! The services that had previously taken one year to deliver can now being delivered to users in one month. Previously, Geoscience Australia had only handled approximately 100 orders for elevation data a month, where-as now they are handling between up to 1500 orders per month. Previously the largest order count in a year over the last 8 years was 1360, meaning in the first year of ELVIS more data will be delivered than in the previous 8 yrs. ELVIS can deliver the data in a range of file formats facilitating consumption by a wider range of industries and stakeholders. It ensures that decision makers, investors and the community have easy access to the best available elevation data to address current and future needs.