The GeoGuide website presents published articles about geosites and allows them to be explored using an interactive map. Grid references in the text are
plotted on the map, making it easy to find each locality. This should assist in discovering sites of geological interest, understanding the geology and
preparing site visits. Content currently covers England, Wales and Scotland.
Text on GeoGuide is processed and annotated with various different types of annotations.
- [Point locations]: grid references are identified within the text and plotted on the adjacent map. Clicking on a grid reference will pan the map to that location; clicking on a point on the map will navigate you to its location in the text.
- Figures: most texts have figures, plates and tables. Clicking on a reference to a figure will scroll the sidebar to display that figure and highlight it with a green margin. On GeoGuide, figures have a unique reference code and are decoupled from the text. Only figures which are referenced in the text are displayed alongside it.
- Named rock units: by making use of linked open data provided by the British Geological Survey, we have annotated where lithostratigraphical units from the BGS Lexicon of Named Rock Units occur in the text. Clicking on a rock unit displays a short description of the unit, including its age, and provides a link to the BGS Lexicon for more information. Nte that occasionally false matches are made, mainly for morphological and superficial units such as 'Falls' or 'Head'.
- Chronostratigraphic units and geochronological dates: Chronostratigraphical units (eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages) are also detected using BGS linked open data. Clicking on one of these shows the broader parent unit, as well as the preceeding and succeeding units. Where the text contains geochronological dates (in ka, Ma or Ga), these are also highlighted and plotted on an interactive, zoomable and scrollable timeline, visible at the top of the page.
- Fossil taxa: The GB3D Type Fossils project provides high-resolution images and scans of type specimens of fossils. The names of these taxa have been annotated in the text, with a pop-up which links to images and more metadata on the GB3D site. Note that only type fossils in the GB3D database are included, and sometimes false matches may occur, such as when only the genus of the taxon is detected, and not the species.
- Footnotes*: some publications make use of footnotes which lie outside the main flow of the text. Click on the asterisk, and the footnote will appear in a pop-up.
- Links to other pages: links to other pages on the GeoGuide site also appear as annotations.
New types of annotation are being added as we develop the website. The entire text content (many MB of data) needs to be reprocessed every time a new feature is added, so not all annotations are available for every page. We are working through all text on the site to bring it up to date.
The GeoGuide website is part of a wider project, led by the
Scottish Geology Trust, to promote and report on geosites in
Scotland, in cooperation with JNCC and
NatureScot. It is a sister site to the main Geosites volunteer project website.
There are currently 5,930 pages on the site, from 125 publications, with
13,259 figures or tables and 48,458 mapped locations.
Please contact geosites@scottishgeologytrust.org with any comments or questions.
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to the organisations and individuals who have allowed their work to be made available on GeoGuide. More details about the
origins of each text are available at the top of each page on the website.
Thanks also to the following organisations, whose data were used to annotate the text:
- BGS Linked Data (Contains British Geological Survey materials © UKRI 2025)
- GB3D Type Fossils, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. © JISC GB3D Type Fossils Online project partners.
