Spatial Information – INSPIRE

We live in a digital world. Spatial information – organised data that has a spatial location – is used for almost all aspects of our lives: navigation, weather forecasting, managing land use, physical infrastructure, environmental change. Less commonly considered, but of key importance is subsurface (geological) data. Understanding the subsurface is crucial for informing policy to address the many challenges of the green transition. For example, easy and efficient access to digital subsurface data is crucial for prioritising competing surface and subsurface uses such as agriculture, city infrastructure, and mining, for sustainable management of water, energy, and minerals, and for monitoring and understanding landslide risk and land subsidence.

Recognising the social, environmental, and political importance of subsurface data, EuroGeoSurveys has collaborated on many EU projects for almost two decades, generating large volumes of harmonised pan-European data. However, in 2014 an analysis of these projects showed that only a small fraction of the data continued to be available online, only a few years after projects had ended. To secure data integrity and deliver findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data through a common, sustainable, open access online platform, the European Geological Data Infrastructure (EGDI) was launched in 2016. Since then, EGDI has become the cornerstone of the EuroGeoSurveys network and is seen as the path to a future sustainable Geological Service for Europe.

But the world has not always been digital. The Geological Surveys of Europe have collected large volumes of subsurface, geological, data for decades and in some cases more than one hundred years. These data – geological maps, observations, samples etc. – have been collected in different formats and using different methods, often in analogue format. So, another of the key goals of the SIEG is to gather, digitise and harmonise the various data held by the Geological Surveys of Europe and deliver them through EGDI. Such harmonised, borderless data, gathered over decades, are imperative for sound Europe-wide decision making.

Today, EGDI holds more than 800 data layers of data, many documents, and a database of 3D models. The data relate to onshore and offshore geology, mineral resources, earth observations and geological hazards, energy, geochemistry, groundwater, and urban geology. And the data are visualised through a map viewer, downloadable, and searchable via text, a document repository, a metadata catalogue, and through map services and layers.