TOUCH GIS — A ROBUST MOBILE GIS PLATFORM FOR DIGITAL GEOLOGIC MAPPING, FIELD DATA COLLECTION AND VISUALIZATION

Recent technological advances in both mobile hardware and geographic information systems (GIS) software have opened exciting new opportunities for more efficient, organized, and successful geoscience field data collection and geologic mapping. Over the past decade, various mobile GIS applications have improved some aspects of geoscience workflows in the field, such as geolocating photos, displaying georeferenced maps, and collecting structural data. Despite these advances, there is strong demand for a versatile, all-in-one, and fully customizable mobile GIS platform that brings most of the analog tools of field geology into the digital era and also offers easy interoperability with other mobile and desktop GIS. Touch GIS is a powerful new mobile GIS platform built for online and offline field data collection and visualization. The app runs on iOS devices (iPad and iPhone) and is designed to give geoscience researchers and students the ability to rapidly and efficiently collect field data and to conduct geologic mapping using an integrated suite of digital tools. Touch GIS facilitates robust digital geologic mapping workflows with features that allow: (1) accurate freehand drawing of lines and polygons; (2) linking notes, photos and other metadata to vector data; (3) annotating photos and drawing sketches; and (4) directly measuring, recording, and plotting planar structural features (strike/dip) using a built-in digital compass-clinometer and preloaded geologic point symbols. Integrated Web Map Tile Services let users easily download and cache various satellite imagery and topographic base maps from right within the app for offline use in the field. Touch GIS supports a variety of import and export formats for easy file sharing and integration with desktop software, including shapefiles, KMZ/KML, GeoTIF (import), CSV (export), and more. Data collection is fully customizable, allowing users to create, edit, manage and share feature classes and data with others while offline in the field. Future geoscientific enhancements to the Touch GIS platform will involve adding polyline symbology for common geologic line types (e.g., normal fault, syncline axis, etc.), enabling the measurement of linear structural features (trend/plunge), and expanding raster file import options to include GeoPDF and KMZ formats.