Key challenges and opportunities facing the geospatial information industry: a view from the British Geological Survey

The British Geological Survey has a bold new strategy to instrument the earth. What does that mean in terms of data and specifically geospatial information? In essence the survey is going to be moving from concentrating on the solid subsurface to monitoring processes below the ground in real time. This will necessitate not just the instrumentation of subsurface boreholes but also the use of satellite measurements and real-time monitoring of natural hazards. The drive for this monitoring is to enable us to model, predict and mitigate the impacts of environmental change. To do this effectively will mean that we will need to look at novel ways to visualise and communicate our data to nonspecialist users and combine our geological data with data from other sectors. Making use of mobile platforms and open data will provide us with many opportunities as well as some significant challenges over the next five years. These can be grouped into 3 areas discussed on the following pages.