The capture and dissemination of integrated 3D geospatial knowledge at the British Geological Survey using GSI3D software and methodology

The Geological Surveying and Investigation in 3 Dimensions (GSI3D) software tool and methodology has been developed over the last 15 years. Since 2001 this has been in cooperation with the British Geological Survey (BGS). To-date over a hundred BGS geologists have learned to use the software that is now routinely deployed in building systematic and commercial 3D geological models. The success of the GSI3D methodology and software is based on its intuitive design and the fact that it utilises exactly the same data and methods, albeit in digital forms, that geologists have been using for two centuries in order to make geological maps and cross-sections. The geologist constructs models based on a career of observation of geological phenomena, thereby incorporating tacit knowledge into the model. This knowledge capture is a key element to the GSI3D approach. In BGS GSI3D is part of a much wider set of systems and work processes that together make up the cyberinfrastructure of a modern geological survey. The GSI3D software is not yet designed to cope with bedrock structures in which individual stratigraphic surfaces are repeated or inverted, but the software is currently being extended by BGS to encompass these more complex geological scenarios. A further challenge for BGS is to enable its 3D geological models to become part of the semantic Web using GML application schema like GeoSciML The biggest benefits of widely available systematic geological models will be an enhanced public understanding of the sub-surface in 3D, and the teaching of geoscience students. Crown Copyright (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.