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The Coordinating Committee for Geoscience Programmes in East and Southeast Asia (CCOP) whose headquarters is in Bangkok, Thailand, is an intergovernmental organization with 11 Member Countries - Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Its mission is to facilitate and coordinate the implementation of applied geoscience programmes in East and Southeast Asia in order to contribute to economic development and an improved quality of life within the region.
CCOP has had activities on digital map compilation, including geotectonic map, magnetic anomaly map, geologic map and composite map of offshore tertiary sediments. Also activities related to spatial data collection have been carried out, such as metadata for geological maps, Asian multilingual thesaurus for geoscience and bibliographic database for geoscience.
As a regional geoscientific organization in Asia, CCOP committed its support to the OneGeology (1G) international initiative at the 1G workshop in Brighton, United Kingdom held in March 2007 and subsequently developed a 1G-CCOP project. This project aims to have its own geologic map made accessible internationally, and to work on standardization for data interoperability. CCOP also recognized this opportunity to collaborate with this global initiative to contribute to the International Year of the Planet Earth. Furthermore, this is also an opportunity for its Member Countries' geological surveys to update its digital geological maps to be of international standard, interoperable and accessible by the rest of the world.
The first 1G-CCOP meeting was held on 25 January 2008 at the Geological Survey of Japan (GSJ), AIST, Tsukuba, Japan. The meeting was organized to introduce the outline of 1G Project and to discuss how to organize the project among the CCOP Member Countries. It was agreed at the meeting that the 1:2M digital geologic map of CCOP Member Countries, a product of the CCOP project, DCGM Phase I, will be first made available to the OneGeology Portal through a WMS server to be setup by GSJ for CCOP, and then next is the 1:1M geologic map.
Most of the CCOP Member Countries have already a 1:1M geologic map, in vector format with lithology and age features, in hand. This will be made accessible through CCOP's web services. Initially, CCOP will have a WMS server to distribute the map, then WFS. In addition, a Member Country can also have its map accessible as a web service from its own website.
1G-CCOP working group meetings are planned to be held regularly to discuss issues and problems with regards to the map and server preparations for interoperable map distribution to the 1G portal. Standardization of the geologic features and legends, as well as harmonization of the geological boundaries is required toward interoperable geologic maps in the CCOP region.
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