Update from Cam (Cameron.Penn-Clarke@wits.ac.za)
To date we have logged 514 individual SACS stratotypes from the SACS Lithostatigraphic Series (complete) and SACS Handbook 8 (Nambian and Phanerozoic erathems), complete with GPS co-ordinates and associated locality information. Our plan is to link these to images of measured sections at the individual sites (where present). Ongoing work is to complete georeferencing and locating stratotypes in the SACS Catalogue Series as well as the remainder of units in SACS Handbook 8.
The SACS database schema we developed unfortunately does not appear to be working. Limitations here are that it is being captured using a flat database system in spreadsheets by non-specialist stratigraphers (students). It will be best in future that these are captured and curated by individual SACS Task Teams for particular units. For now, I have scaled back these efforts and my intern students are only capturing data from the lexicons.
Marcia and I will be planning to meet up again with regards to the assistance of SABLE in building the SACS database.
Geodyssey is still looking for a full time developer. Prospective costs for development are sitting at around R440k just to build the app without additional costs for annual maintenance and adhoc fees.
We meet with Prof Jan van Bever Donker and his post doc Dr Charl Cilliers with regards to VFT’s and displaying these on the app. These meetings will be expanded in the coming months with Wendy and Len regarding our own VFT projects. Issues identified by Jan and Charl, naturally, are where these data will be hosted and maintained in the long term. I could store these at Wits on our PANGGEO server, however, there is no plan in place currently for hand over / sutainability should I leave one day, for the data repository as well as IP rights between UWC and WITS.
ends