SURROUND successfully completed a project for the Department of Agriculture, Water and Environment (DAWE) regarding the Plant Health Surveillance (PHS) Ontology and Vocabularies. This includes:
- Controlled lists of allowable values
- Defining terms
- A central ‘Point of Truth’ - replacing static documents that become out of date
- Data quality
- Data validation rules ‘read’ the vocabulary lists and recognise which terms can apply (e.g., trap type for a given pest, or inspection method)
- Validation of Surveillance Data including:
- Pest taxa
- Trap types
- Lure types
- Inspection methods
SURROUND’s work with PHS allows data enablers, owners, contributors, consumers, and producers to:
- Share and publish data requirements for humans and machines
- Define requirements for:
- minimum data governance and conformance inclusions
- data entry and submission
- best practice data approaches
- interoperability
- provenance and traceability
- priming for use in machine learning (ML)

Figure X: PHS ontology overview, showing the major classes and their relationships to more abstract ontology elements, from the ontology's official online location at https://linked.data.gov.au/def/phs