Geoscience Index System (version 3.0) User Guide

The BGS Directorate commissioned the geoscience index as a computer system to improve access to BGS data. It is part of a move to open systems, as recommended by an NCS Visiting Group, and uses a Geographic Information System (Arc/Info) - a fast growing area of NERC computing. The programs were written in Arc Macro Language by K A M Adlam and J R Gibson. The index is still developing rapidly. The index datasets represent many man-years of effort within many divisions of BGS. Although the index is limited and incomplete, they include, for Great Britain and the surrounding continental shelf: published and unpublished maps, reports, records, samples, boreholes, and geochemical and geophysical data. The system is designed for geographically-referenced data, where the main links between datasets are spatial, and searches are for specific areas. the maps can be searched and queried interactively, to retrieve information from an associated Oracle database.