STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT AND MAPPING SUPPORT, FROM THE NATIONAL GEOLOGIC MAP DATABASE

The USGS and the Association of American State Geologists (AASG) are mandated by Congress to provide a National Geologic Map Database (NGMDB, http://ngmdb.usgs.gov) of standardized, spatial geoscience information. This USGS-AASG partnership also involves collaboration with the Geological Survey of Canada, universities, and the private sector. By working together on this Database and the standards that support it, the USGS and the states also improve their own ability to deliver geologic map and related products to their users. Information about the activities managed by the NGMDB is available at http://ngmdb.usgs.gov.

To support both our external users and the geologic mappers and GIS specialists who prepare maps and databases, the NGMDB project provides access to many online resources. For example: 1) cartographic, database, science terminology, and data-exchange (e.g., the XML-based GeoSciML format) standards; 2) the U.S. Geologic Names Lexicon (GEOLEX), a standard reference for the nation's stratigraphic nomenclature; 3) the Geoscience Map Catalog (containing citations and links to ~78,000 publications); and 4) Proceedings from the eleven annual Digital Mapping Techniques workshops, which document map-preparation techniques and standards in use or in development by the nation's geological surveys.

The NGMDB project continues to strive for development of more useful standards, and for their implementation by the geoscience community. These standards are forming the basis for the prototype NGMDB data portal, in which the full 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.