CONTENT:

It is the overall aim of GeoERA to integrate information and knowledge to support sustainable use of the subsurface. The geoscientific projects (GSPs) on subsurface energy, water and raw material resources will produce large amounts of geological data and information and the GeoERA Information Platform Project (GIP-P) will establish a common platform for organising, disseminating and sustaining the digital results of those projects.

The platform will include a central database, a metadatabase, a user friendly web-portal and a digital archive for organising reports and unstructured data. The portal will include facilities for visualising complex information like 3D/4D geological models. In order to ensure that the needs of the GSPs are fully identified and understood by the experts who will implement the platform, a specific organisation will be set up to liaise between those projects and the GIP-P.

Great effort will be put into adhering to European and international standards in order for the results to be as useful as possible for the whole of GeoERA and its external users thereby maximising the overall impact of the project. Techniques like Linked Open Data and multilingual thesauri will be implemented to ensure maximum interoperability of the data and services.

The platform will be based on a coherent architecture which will take into account experiences gained in previous EU funded data harmonisation projects and be built as an extension to the European Geological Data Infrastructure (EGDI). The project will explore how the sustainability of the platform is ensured after the end of GeoERA.