Data Interchange for Geotechnical and GeoEnvironmental Specialists (DIGGS)

DIGGS is a coalition of government agencies, universities and industry partners whose focus is on the creation and maintenance of an international data transfer standard for transportation related data. The coalition came into existence through coordination from the US Federal Highway Administration sponsoring meetings and eventually forming the pooled fund study project. The initial base schema consists of geotechnical data including Borehole, soil testing, site information and more. The first SIG is extending the schema to include Geo-Environmental testing. More SIGs and expanded membership are in the works.

Pooled Fund Project TPF 5(111)

The Pooled Fund Project is a US Federal Highways Administration project administered by the state of Ohio. Multiple states commit funds to create a larger project under which all organizations receive the benefit from the project. The DIGGS project was created to develop an international standard interchange format for geotechnical data. The project brought together the existing formats created by Association of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Specialists in the United Kingdom (AGS), Consortium of Organizations for Strong-Motion Observation Systems (COSMOS) and Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) created by the University of Florida (UF). The project has a governance structure for developing the base schema as well as Special Interest Groups (SIG) to create extensions. The result of the project is the DIGGS schema. Pooled Fund Project >

Public Review

The draft DIGGS standard is will be available soon for review and comment. In order to act as a reviewer, you must create an account. You will then have access to download the schema and documentation as well as participate in the online review forum. The forums will be monitored and the DIGGS team will answer questions to help in the understanding and implementation of the schema and will be the main point of contact for review comments. Review Forum >

Recent Blog Entries (Full Blog Listing)


USA Environmental SIG presentation – New Orleans

Tue, 25/03/2008 - 13:00 — Environmental SIG

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.

Using the DIGGSML Catalog File to Cache Your Schemas Locally

Tue, 09/10/2007 - 17:18 — Chris Bray

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.