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sedimentological, tectonic, volcanological, etc. features in the field, which help to
determine the genetics of the observed rock. These features can be recorded in the field
both in DGM devices, and in traditional notebooks, but finally the data within the
database will be stored in sub-tables.
14.2.3 Visualisation of the Observed Data on XML Bases
The XML (Extensible Markup Language) was created to store documents in
machine-readable form. It was developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consor-
tium) in 1998 from an ISO standard (SGML
Standard Generalized Markup
Language) with the purpose to store and transfer data via Internet (ISO 8879
1986 ; W3C XML 1998 ). The structure of an XML file is defined in a schema
document (XSD, or XMS), which, like an empty database, contains information
about the data-fields and types. The KML files, officially named the OpenGIS ®
KML Encoding Standard, are also XML documents, but specialized for the descrip-
tion of geospatial data. Since both the XML and the KML are open standards, data
collecting, processing and visualizing applications can be developed freely to imply
these data structures. The KML is maintained by the Open Geospatial Consortium
Inc. (OGC 2008 ), and was improved several times since its first publication. The
KML standard became widespread along the expansion of Google Maps and
Google Earth.
The structure and the content of the geological observation database were
translated into KML files to create Google Earth compatible selections of specific
outcrops. In the process, the “ogckml22.xsd” XML schema file was used. The
criteria of the selection varied according to the purpose of the visualisation.
Basically, the following criteria were used:
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1. Outcrops of public interest
2. Outcrops of a specific area
3. Outcrops documented by a specific person
The first category was restricted to those outcrops which had high importance.
Some of the KML files were used by the geologists of the Regional Mapping
Project, some of them were published on the Internet to disseminate the geological
knowledge (Albert and Csillag 2010 ).
Besides a wide range of documents, the KML format can also describe geo-
referenced images, spatial vectors, polygons and shapes. This allows one to tran-
scribe maps in raster or vector file format into KML files. It is especially useful if
the user interface—preferably a free software package for visual representation of
the data—works with this kind of file structure. Thus, the documented geological
data might be visualized together with the photos and geological maps (Fig. 14.6 ).
The transcription of the geological maps of selected regions was carried out with
the Global Mapper 10 software. For the user interface the Google Earth 5.2 (GE)
freely downloadable software was applied (Google Earth 2010 ), but any GIS
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