New ways of dissemination and delivery of geoscience information to society

For many decades geological maps have been representing the only way geoscientists conveyed their gained knowledge about the earth and its subsurface. The geological map is often compared to a logical model that has been drawn by geologists based on available often heterogeneous data, mapping experience and personal deduction. The amount of geological information that is "hidden" in a geological map is great, but the number of people that can "read" and utilize the information is very small.
The rapid development of information technology, especially geographical information systems and the Internet has opened the door for developing more effective ways to disseminate and deliver the geoscientific information not only to geoscientists, but also to land planners, natural risk managers and even to general public to use geological data and information in their "field of interest". On the other hand the "digital era" has created new challenges for national geological surveys - natural geoscience data providers to be able to react firstly to the growing demand of our society on the applied and interpreted geoscientific information, which has been evoked especially by the recent natural disasters and the pressure on the prevention and minimizing of their after-effects, secondly to tackle the "in-house" difficulties in getting the vast amount of geoscientific data sources that geological surveys manage interoperable not to mention semantically harmonized.
The presentation will cover and demonstrate a range of the most effective and up to date ways to disseminate geological information starting from presenting utilization of Internet Map Server technology and common geoscience data model (including GeoSciML) to provide on-line access to digital (raster or vector) national geological maps and related geoscience information through on-line automated geo-reporting systems that harvest the amount of different geoscience data sources and ending in the possible future integration of geoscience information services into distributed complex environmental systems or development of global geoscience ontological services for earth sciences based upon Semantic Web Services oriented architectures.