Mapping the geological space beneath your feet : the journey from 2D paper to 3D digital spatial data

The map is more important than ever, but what it can represent and how it is delivered is changing radically as new geospatial technologies emerge. In the field of geology, paper maps have always aimed to represent the complex threedimensional world beneath our feet and make it understandable to us at the surface. However, new smart phone mapping applications enable us to take the map with us more easily and to ask questions of it wherever we are, and to add our own observations on to it. Digital survey and modelling technologies will enable geologists to communicate geology in 3D for us, rather than having to translate it to 2D; everyone will then see the geology as the geologist does as we take visualisation from the lab to the street. As an interactive tool the geological map of the future will be very different

Mobile spatial mapping and augmented reality applications for environmental geoscience

Modern communication technologies are changing the way we think about spatial mapping information and how we deliver it into the hands of end-users. For geoscience, the challenges are particularly interesting because of the strong three-dimensional nature and sheer richness of the underlying geological information. For several hundreds of years, the favoured method for delivering this information has been the paper map. However, as in the topographical sector, the geosciences have moved rapidly over recent years to digital platforms for effective delivery of spatial information. What we are delivering is still a map, but what it looks like and how it is carried will have changed beyond recognition for earlier surveyors. In particular, new generations of mobile tablet computers and smartphones, which can self-locate using GPS technology, and stream in spatial mapping live to the user, have all but rendered the paper map redundant in many parts of the UK and beyond. Furthermore, the interactive nature of these technologies allows two-way sharing of information, through twinned display of digital maps and live ‘crowdsourced’ collection of point observations. But perhaps the greatest opportunities lie in the use of augmented reality techniques to transform complex three-dimensional information into an easily digestible form for the user. The paper map made an admirable attempt to do this in the geosciences but mobile technologies and software offer the chance to at last display the information in the way it has always existed within the mind of the geological surveyor. This paper describes the informatics research and development work lead by the British Geological Survey (Natural Environment Research Council) which is taking on these challenges and opportunities, and is already beginning to deliver a new and very different generation of the geological map