GEIXS aims to produce harmonized metadata for the geoscience data holdings of the 15 EU Geological Surveys as well as those of Norway and 8 East European countries. The data will be made available over the Internet from a central server using a specially written application allowing spatial and/or topic searching and incorporating a multilingual thesaurus.
The Geological Surveys of the European Union have been collecting data for well over a century and are the primary sources of geoscience information in their respective countries. This data underpins the energy, minerals, construction, mining, water and waste disposal industries, as well as being essential for planners, public administrators and academia. However, at present it can be very difficult to determine even what relevant geoscience data exists, as each national Geological Survey needs to be approached separately and each contains data using different standards, in different formats, and often in different languages. The Geological Electronic Information eXchange System (GEIXS) project has been set up to address this problem.
The objective of GEIXS is to standardize the data descriptions used by the Surveys and thus allow the building of a single database describing geoscience data throughout Europe. This will be implemented on a Web server computer in Brussels and a graphic interface to it developed using conventional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. The database will be linked to a Multilingual Thesaurus so that it can be interrogated using a range of European languages. The computer and interface will be accessible using the World Wide Web (WWW) so that anyone in Europe or beyond who is connected to the Internet will be able to query the database to determine what geoscience information is available where, within Europe.
Project URL : http://www.eurogeosurveys.org