The development of a standardized approach for managing data generated through land resource field research

Research was conducted to develop a standardized approach to describe and organize land resource field research data. The requirements of a database for managing the large volumes of data generated through this type of research were documented. A conceptual data model was developed, using the Entity Relationship Model, which described the semantics of the data. The conceptual data model included generic entities that accommodated the general categories of data identified and the relationships between those categories. Two distinct levels of data were distinguished, the data-level and the meta-level. A logical data model was developed from the conceptual data model and the consideration of performance requirements for the database. This logical data model detailed the structure of database tables that could be implemented in a relational database management system. The outlined database structure can be used to amalgamate datasets from multiple land resource field research projects.