Geologists around the world are to bring together all their maps, producing the first truly global resource on rocks.  Known as the OneGeology project, it will pool existing knowledge about what lies under our feet, and present it through one web portal.

Led by the British Geological Survey (BGS), the effort calls on scientists from more than 55 nations. It hopes to be able to display searchable rock data for the entire Earth down to the scale of 1:1,000,000.

"There is currently a problem of accessibility," said Ian Jackson, the OneGeology Project Leader from BGS. "We know the data exists; but it's not always clear where it is, and some of it is still in paper form. We want to make more available the data that has already being surveyed, modelled and paid for."

The portal will work on a distributed model, with national surveys retaining their data but allowing it to be interrogated through the portal using a common computer mark up language such as GeoSciML.

Much of the content - although not all of it - will be free to browse.

Source: BBC News