The British Geological Survey began developing digital field mapping systems in
1989. However, it was apparent that the commercially available hardware was not
suitable at that time. In 2001, we revisited the topic under the System for Integrated
Geoscience Mapping (SIGMA) programme. By 2003, BGS had developed a PDA
(personal digital assistant) field system, which was superseded in 2005, when we
began deploying a beta system on rugged Tablet PCs. The Tablet PC system, which
we called BGS•SIGMAmobile was used by BGS in mapping projects across the UK
as well as overseas. It first became available in Open Source form, in June 2009 via
the BGS website, www.bgs.ac.uk, under an agreement which stipulates that updates
and modifications must be supplied to BGS in order to stimulate further
developments. In 2011/2012, BGS•SIGMAmobile was rewritten in .NET and
combined with our office based mapping software BGS•SIGMAdesktop within
ArcGIS 10.x to create BGS•SIGMA 2012. BGS•SIGMA has been updated again to
take all of the forms out of Access and are now accessed directly from ArcMap in the
latest BGS•SIGMA 2015.
It is envisaged that future releases will be made available from the BGS website
incorporating new modules, modifications and upgrades supplied by BGS and
external users of the system.
This document has been written to guide users through the installation and use of
BGS•SIGMA 2015 (mobile and desktop), which is the fourth free release.
We are happy to receive feedback and modifications emailed to [email protected]