GeoData & Information Management

Digitally accessible

This data is digitally accessible for a variety of purposes, including the development of spatial plans, policy-making and scientific research. This helps governments, companies and other stakeholders with their spatial plans and decisions. Information from the Geological Survey of the Netherlands is frequently consulted by central government, provinces, municipalities, water boards, universities, schools, engineering firms and interested citizens.

Legal tasks

Our activities have a legal basis. According to the Subsurface Key Register Act and the Mining Act, we have the task of storing, processing and monitoring the quality of subsurface data. The expertise group focuses on data management, data and information modelling and data science. We maintain the content of the central storage of all available subsurface data. We also deal with information analysis, information management, data modelling and standardisation.

Artificial intelligence

We use artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and algorithm development to keep the data permanently up to date. This allows us to update the large amounts of data in a fully automated way.

Subsurface samples

Subsurface data are not only available digitally. In the Central Core Storage tens of thousands of samples from the subsurface of the Netherlands are stored, collected at sea and on land over a period of more than 100 years. It is a unique archive of the subsurface that is mainly used by other research institutes and companies.

IT infrastructure and applications

Together with our colleagues from the Geo-Information Technology expertise group, we are responsible for the IT of Geological Survey of the Netherlands and all applications within it. GeoData & Information Management focuses mainly on managing the information, while Geo-Information Technology takes care of the IT infrastructure and applications. Our expertise group also includes the service desk and the (external) communication team supporting the Geological Survey of the Netherlands.

We make our subsurface knowledge available through various digital channels. The main ones are:

• BROloket (portal of the Basic Registration of the Subsurface
• DINOloket (data and information portal of the Netherlands Geological Survey)
• NLOG (Dutch oil and gas portal)
• GeoTOP (3D model of the subsurface up to a maximum of 50 metres below sea level)