This report serves as an installation and introductory user guide to
BGS·SIGMAmobile, which is an application for digital geoscience field data
collection developed within the British Geological Survey’s SIGMA (System for
Integrated Geoscience Mapping) programme within the Earth & Planetary
Observation & Monitoring Team. This document provides installation instructions,
followed by a brief guide to using the application. In BGS we provide our field staff
with a two-day training course, and while this guide does not replace that, it is hoped
that these instructions will provide a basis for successful use of BGS·SIGMAmobile
in your organisation.
BGS·SIGMAmobile is designed to run in the field on rugged Tablet PCs, but can also
be used on a laptop or a desktop PC. The system is a heavily customised ArcGIS 9.3.1
(service pack 1) and MSAccess application. The user must have a licensed copy of
ArcView ArcGIS and MSAccess 2003, BGS does not supply these. The system will
run with MSAccess2007 but the database must be stored as a 2002-2003 .mdb file
otherwise it will not be compatible with ArcGIS. It is fully tested on the Windows XP
operating system; BGS does not currently use the Windows 7 operating system and
therefore no testing of the system on Windows 7 has taken place.
The BGS uses the application on several models of Tablet PC including Itronix
GoBooks, Xplore iX104s and GETAC V100’s. This guide does not provide
instructions to its use on specific hardware platforms.
BGS staff have used the system for mapping in locations including the UK, Ghana,
Madagascar, Tajikistan, the Antarctic and the U.S.A. We use it as part of a workflow
of other customised BGS-developed systems that enables us to:
1. automatically collate spatial information from our databases,
2. interpret new data from satellite imagery and digital photogrammetry,
3. take our baseline and interpreted data to the field,
4. populate corporate databases with our field data,
5. build 3D digital models and visualisations,
6. output our data in formats such as maps.
Further information on these steps is available from the BGS website at
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/technologies_epo.html. Only the field system has been
supplied in this Open Source agreement so you will need to build/define your own
methods for integrating BGS·SIGMAmobile into your mapping workflow
