A MAP PORTAL FOR 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 online resources including the U.S. Geologic Names Lexicon (GEOLEX), the Geoscience Map Catalog, and the Proceedings of the annual Digital Mapping Techniques workshops. The NGMDB project also 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 form 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 Portal for browsing and querying and, on a limited basis, for downloading in formats such as Arc Shapefiles and GeoSciML. The portal is being designed to be interoperable with other NGMDB databases (Map Catalog, Geolex), and supported by software tools that facilitate the processing of datasets into the NGMDB database format and science terminology. Further, it is implementing a GeoWiki to evaluate whether this technology can effectively enable local and regional geologic experts to contribute data, information, and comments for geologic features and regions of interest. We expect the prototype data portal to be publicly available in late 2007.