THE ODYSSEY – ADVENTURES IN WEB MAPPING AT THE PENNSYLVANIA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

With Google thumbing its nose at us every day, it was inevitable that state geological surveys would become mesmerized by the capability inherent in web-mapping applications. Having only recently succumbed, the Pennsylvania Geological Survey might claim superior resistance to that siren’s call, but as many would suspect, the truth is more complex.

While anxious to share our wares via maps on the web, hiring staff or contracting for the services necessary to develop such an application were less likely than ever due to recent decreases in both staff and budget. Yet, foresight at our parent agency, combined with human-resource serendipity enabled us to deploy a web mapping application that serves as a public portal to Pennsylvania’s geological information. Users can display bedrock and surficial geology, clip and download the underlying data, and through sophisticated geographical searches, identify and download all of our publications. New data and capabilities are added routinely as the site evolves. Internally one of the side benefits has been the creation of an enterprise geodatabase schema and workflows that will, for the first time, support all geological mapping at the agency