Designing a Landslide Database; lessons from Australian examples

The Australian Geomechanics Society 2007 Landslide Risk Management Guidelines stress the importance of developing inventories of landslides in order to underpin better land management decisions and facilitate landslide research . In the absence of a definitive (and published) data model for the inventory a number of landslide databases have been created in Australia to serve a range of purposes, all of which pre-date the guidelines. We outline a project undertaken to develop a website linking four disparate landslide databases together using network service oriented interoperability concepts and technology. From this project we have learned a number of important lessons. Digital landslide databases in our view should combine both spatial and non-spatial data and take advantage of the current information technology available. Unfortunately there is much research and design required before we have a satisfactory model to address a range of required functionality. Conceptual approaches require skill sets and technology that may be foreign to traditional geotechnical practitioners. We believe that there is merit in establishing an open forum to share, discuss and improve landslide database models. We list data concepts that need to be captured and offer examples of topological representations of various landslide types.