CLARITY AND CONSISTENCY OF SCIENTIFIC TERMINOLOGY: A ROLE FOR THE NATIONAL GEOLOGIC MAP DATABASE

“…the maps are designed not so much for the specialist as for the people, who justly look to the official geologist for a classification, nomenclature, and system of convention so simple and expressive as to render his work immediately [understandable]…” (Powell, 1888). These words eloquently expressed the purpose of geologic mapping and the need to clearly communicate to the public, and they are at least as true today as when they were written. They serve as the guiding philosophy for the National Geologic Map Database project (NGMDB; http://ngmdb.usgs.gov), a Congressionally-mandated collaboration between the USGS and Association of American State Geologists (AASG).

For the past decade, the NGMDB's goal has been to help users find the information they need to address a variety of societal and research applications. Society, businesses, and private citizens are not faced with simple, one-dimensional issues; in order for geologic information to be used, it must be presented in a readily comprehensible form that can be integrated with other types of information. In other words, the presentation of geologic information must, to some extent, be standardized. Geological surveys produce individual maps, reports, and datasets in a wide variety of formats and layouts, each containing specialized scientific terminology. Without a doubt, these have proven immensely valuable to our users. With this in mind, the NGMDB project has been a leader in geologic map standards-development efforts that include: 1) the FGDC Geologic Map Symbolization Standard, 2) the North American Data Model's (NADM) Science Language, 3) the NADM Conceptual Data Model, and 4) the IUGS-sponsored data-interchange format “GeoSciML”. These standards are being developed through the efforts of many hundreds of geologists across the world, which helps to ensure their adoption. A debt of thanks is owed to these individuals and agencies, who contributed so significantly to these activities.

These standards form the basis for the NGMDB data portal, in which the richness and variability of map information will be managed by the publishing agencies or other repositories, with a subset of the geologic attributes made available via the NGMDB portal for browsing and querying and, on a limited basis, for downloading in formats such as Arc Shapefile and GeoSciML.