| Abstract |
City authorities and other stakeholders in urban environments produce and have access to a greater density of data than is often the case in lesser populated areas, however, it is often very difficult to collate all relevant information together in a useful and easily communicated manner. With such a wide spectrum of stakeholder groups, each with specialist requirements and differing levels of knowledge, it is extremely challenging to provide effective communication tools that disseminate geoscience data and models as useable information. Information about the subsurface needs to be made available in ways which are appropriate to each type of consumer, from a geotechnical engineer carrying out a site investigation to a member of the public wanting to know if their house is at risk of flooding._x000D_
Arguably the biggest challenges facing those who attempt to understand urban subsurface environments is developing a reliable and affordable strategy for data acquisition, storage, management and communication. Relationships between geological properties and human processes need to be better understood, this requires a greater understanding of interdisciplinary relationships. Geological Survey Organisations (GSOs), and other public bodies, need to incorporate data from external, sometimes commercial, sources in order to see the whole picture and despite advances in technology which have resulted in more data being made available in digital formats, there remains a large body of analogue data sources which are expensive to digitize. Financial constraints on public authorities and the increasing volumes and variability of data generated means that the current labour intensive processes for acquiring subsurface data are unsustainable. In order to minimize manual processing it is necessary for newly acquired data to be captured and communicated between stakeholders using standardized digital formats that support automated processing. |
