Spatial data delivery The British Geological Survey T he British Geological Survey (BGS) has been providing specialist services in the development of web-based spatial data delivery systems for over 15 years. We offer systems and expertise to a range of clients, including research institutes, UK Government and its agencies, international governments, geological surveys across the world, and the oil and gas industry. Interactive web map viewers We develop web map viewers which allow easy interaction with spatial data. One example is our Geology of Britain viewer (www.bgs.ac.uk/geologyOfBritain) which allows users to interrogate the 1:50 000 scale geological map of Britain, providing national coverage and attributed street-level scale geology data. Another example is our GeoIndex (www.bgs.ac.uk/geoindex/) which provides geoscience professionals with a map-based index to our data holdings. We currently run Fieldbank (www.fieldbank.com) with ARKeX, a data management service for gravity and magnetic exploration data, providing data discovery and retrieval via a web-GIS portal. Other industry partnerships have included UKDEAL, a spatial gateway to information on the UK offshore oil and gas industry, which we developed and ran for ten years. Web services We have expertise in making geological spatial datasets available in open, standards-based formats via web services so that they can be combined with data from other sources in geoportal applications as well as within GIS software. The BGS provides data in accordance with a range of international standards such as OGC (WMS, WFS, WCS, CSW), ESRI REST, KML, and GeoRSS. Over the last 10 years, the BGS has played a central role in the development of technical standards and data specifications underpinning INSPIRE. Partnership The BGS has developed portals, combining data from multiple contributors, to provide scientific information to researchers and the wider public. These include the UK Soil Observatory ( www.ukso.org) — a geocommunity initiative between nine leading soil research institutions, offering over 100 free national soil data layers in a web-based map viewer. Also, we administer the OneGeology project (www.onegeology.org), creating a dynamic, integrated, digital geology map of the world, based on OGC standards.