Who am I?

Edd Lewis

BGS Open Standards Lead (& FOSS advocate)

10 years in MinEx/Mining (>5 in Australia)

5 years in Government (Data Standards & Governance/Capacity Building/Mineral Promotion/Resource Policy)

BGS

• National geological survey founded in 1835
• UK custodian of geoscientific information
• Independent
• 600 staff
• Part of UKRI, a not-for-profit public sector research establishment
• Funded by Government & external income
• Offices at Keyworth, Wallingford, Edinburgh & Cardiff

BGS

• Work with Gov, Academia & Industry
• Central Government Advice
• Services to agencies/statutory bodies - Network Rail, Environment Agency
• Services to local gov - Brownfield development, mineral planning

National Geoscience Data Centre

• All data funded by NERC
• Voluntary data deposits - Geotech drilling, Aggregates Production
• Statutory data deposits - Minerals drilling
• Geology

Commercial Data Services

• 10k & 50k Geology
• Value Added Data Products
• Geosure
• Geoclimate
• Brownfield Site Development Cost Estimation

Generic Digital Workflow

GeoVisionary > SIGMA > GroundHog

Central Data Store

Mapping

Focus on 50k

Generally undertaken only as part of other commercial projects

Want to make a single Best Available scale map using the 10k, 50k & 250k mapping

Final Outputs

Data!

No longer produce physical maps - can order from shop & are printed on demand

Available as downloads or web services / API's

GeoVisionary

First immersive 3D Visualisation Facility

February 2005

Virtalis Stereoworks

Christie projector: 1400 x1050 pixels @ 100Hz, 4000 lumens

Main use: display of 3D models from Digital Geoscience Spatial Model Programme

GeoVisionary

GeoVisionary

Originated in BGS – Virtalis R&D collaboration
October 2006: VFR – virtual field reconnaissance – improve results and efficiency of fieldwork using VR technology
Solved the problem of utilising BIG datasets – terabytes of terrain and imagery

Data Integration

Real value realised when data are integrated and interpreted as one

Combine any resolution of elevation data with: imagery, 3D geological models, GIS layers, CAD models, etc seamless movement through the datasets
Supports time
Virtual geological toolkit enables geoscientists to analyse and interpret data

Headsets

Useful low cost visualisation
Immersive
Not so good for working together…

Headsets

Great working environment to understand, interpret and communicate complex 3D information – a common visual language
Greatly increased fieldwork efficiency – make better, faster decisions
Impressive for presentations

Further Info

Training/Customisation/Development

BGS•Σigma

Integrated tool kit for digital geological data capture

Price: Free!

BGS•Σigma

Wanted a new approach with consistant data: field, maps, 3D models, other data products

Prototyped 2001

First release 2006

Latest release 2015

BGS•Σigma

BGS•Σigma

SIGMAdesktop

SIGMAdesktop

Suite of tools to assist in map compilation and decision making

• Combining data from all geologists into one database for generating final data compilation for the project. Entry of field observation points along with linked data
• Cleaning linework
• Generating polygons
• Add more data / hide data

MERGIN Maps

FOSS, QGIS integrated data capture solution

MERGIN Maps

Evaluated ESRI and other FOSS tools

Customisation was high priority along with our data model and DB Integration

ESRI still used for corporate product production and most data delivery

Groundhog Desktop

GroundHog

Borehole Database Integration

Direct link to BGS & OS Web Services

Collab: BGS, GTK, SGU

Latest release 2020!

Community & Professional Editions

Price: Free!

Boreholes

Cross Sections

Implicit 3D Modelling

Only interpolation engine geared to shallow quaternary deposits

Further Modelling

Primarily use GoCAD

Models generally shared as files directly with users/3DPDF

Looking to move to glTF or Voxel models

Build visualisation tool / portal using ESRI API

Knowledge Extraction

Team: Rachel Heaven, Simon Burden, Bob McIntosh, Ike Nkisi-Orji, Marcus Sen, Jo Walsh

Goal

Extract stratigraphic entities and observation locations from unstructured text

Intended benefits:

Interpreted map and model products can contain links to observed data points and conceptual ideas, presenting model uncertainty and provenance

Stratigraphy of an area of interest can be quickly understood from pre-existing literature, saving experts’ time

Explicit and implicit stratigraphic relations can be captured into reusable data for modelling constraints

1. XML Semantic Markup Experiments (early 2000's)

							Physiographic zones 1 and 2 cover the bulk 
							of the study area. Their character is primarily 
							controlled by bedrock type and glacial history. The 
							highly irregular middle zone (2) is underlain by 
							Permian and Triassic
							 rocks; the Permian strata include 
							Upper Permian 
							Zechstein sedimentary rocks that locally
							crop out in the study area.
						

2. Converted to training data

							highly 0
							irregular 0 
							middle 0 
							zone 0
							is 0
							underlain 0
							by 0
							Permian CHRONOSTRAT
							Triassic 0
							rocks 0
							the 0
							Permian CHRONOSTRAT
							strata 0
							include 
							Upper Permian CHRONOSTRAT
							Zechstein LEXICON
							sedimentary 0
						

3. Train a custom Named Entity Recognition (NER) model for strategraphic terms

							java -cp 
							edu.stanford.nlp.ie.crf.CRFClassifier - 
							prop 
						

4. Run text mining using custom NER model for stratigraphy and core NER locations

5. Stratigraphy entities matched to BGS Linked Data Vocabs

6. Locations resolved to geometry using gazetteer

7. Database of mined data with API

9. API supports frequency and corrolation analysis

Standards

Value of geospatial is becoming more significant as the public and private sectors further embrace location

Standards play an important role in facilitating interoperability of location information and applications for improved situational awareness, business intelligence and decision making.

Standards Timeline

GIS Data

Recently included GeoPackage in data download options.

Starting to also receive GeoPackage with data requests

Tools

Major issue of symbology tied to ESRI infrastructure

SLYR to the rescue!

BGS Data

Errors due to CRS (OSGB36) but styling is correct

GIS Data

Deployment of pygeoapi - OGCAPI-Features

More datasets coming soon - WFS > OGCAPI-Features

OGCAPI-Features

• Initially our OGL Data Products
• Supported on ESRI & QGIS
• Needed to run as infrastructure as code
• Use our private cloud infrastructure on Kubenetes
• pygeoapi selected for the task

Architecture

Architecture

pygeoapi Summary

• Easy to setup
• Lightweight
• Customisable
• Supports multiple OGCAPI standards
• Well supported dev community

Vector Tiles

Testing Production of Vector Tiles

Advantages over WMS in speed & flexibility

Testing Using Tippecanoe, pg_tileserv & ESRI

AGS Borehole Data

Working with AGS data format committee on a AGS data validator - API & GUI

Will build generic framework based on FastAPI so can be reskinned for multiple deployents. Support for alternative versions like AGS-Australia on roadmap

Wrap Up

BGS always interested in collaboration

In both Research & Technology

Questions?