Written evidence submitted by Holger Kessler (COM0098)

The British Geological Survey (BGS) is trying hard to better communicate Geological Science to the public and key stakeholders (such as the Environment Agency (EA), Water companies, construction firms, government departments). We are now able to visualise the subsurface of the UK in three dimensions, and the data and models are published as open data – picture and website below

The National Geological Model

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/ukgeology/nationalGeologicalModel/home.html

The need for better understanding of the subsurface by the public is brought to the fore in particular in the current debate about the use of hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking), the search for a permanent nuclear waste storage facility and large tunnelling/construction  projects such as Crossrail and HS2.

It would be hugely valuable to society and the economy if the information and models held at the BGS would be accessible to everyone especially the public, as the fear of the unknown subsurface is often the main hurdle to get the “social license” required to proceed with projects mentioned above.

So, the data and model described above is available as open data (such are increasing amounts of data and models from other government agencies such as the EA and the Ordnance Survey) – what is missing are software solutions that allow the full communication and delivery of these innovative datasets.

We often rely on large commercial providers to provide solutions, but often our science is too niche for our needs to be addressed – for example Google Earth does not enable the visualisation of the subsurface.

Recently BGS has experimented with Minecraft, a very popular games engine, we have developed some free and open software at BGS, we even have the ability to create Lego models, so some solutions are out there.

Schools are ready in terms of hardware to take science models and visualisations but again software is not available and information where data and models are “hidden” has not been made available to teachers.

I would like to see the government and science funders put more emphasis on open software solutions, just as they have on Open Data, as without software a wealth of scientific data will remain unlocked.

Help should be given to model and data producers to engage with the private sector to come up with innovative software solutions and provide the conduit between the researchers and the public, in particular the schools, often there is not the time or resource to do this by ourselves.

May 2016