The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) AuScope Community Earth Model is an example of a data sharing network built for the Australian earth sciences. The earth model is built on infrastructure being provided by the Spatial Information Services Stack (SISS) project. SISS is a collaboration across multiple open source projects in various domains to provide a complete suite of tools that allow for spatial data interoperability. These include Web Mapping and Web Feature Services (WMS/WFS), Geography Mark-up Language (GML) community application schema development and vocabulary and registry services.

The AuScope Grid Community Earth Model project is deploying SISS across multiple Australian Government agencies and research organisations and is developing a Web-based portal for accessing the infrastructure.

SISS makes use of existing open source technologies where possible. As the stack is built on open source technologies, others are welcome to utilise the stack and assist in its development. Current development consists primarily of feature enhancement to support community schema, such as GeoSciML, MineralOccurrencesML and WaterML, along with raising the quality of service level and ensuring the technology stack is complete. For example the AuScope portal discovers services it can use via the GeoNetwork registry. The SISS project makes extensive use of the OGC and ISO standards and established capabilities for these standards to be extended to other communities. As such, the spatial data infrastructures being developed across NCRIS capability areas will be able to interoperate and share resources to establish a spatial information data commons that will also be accessible by other communities of interest.