There are a number of tool available for accessing the information in EGDI. These are:
- Map viewer (opens in a new tab). Powerful and easy-to-use online application for visualising and querying spatial information through interactive maps, including various tools to perform further data analysis. The user can select different base layers and add layers from all the geoscientific topics covered by EGDI. Data in the layers can also be accessed through OGC view and download services and many data can also be downloaded as GIS files.
- Data search. Allows users to discover and access available datasets, view their metadata and select, display and download subsets of elements from multiple datasets. Datasets that do not contain in their metadata or their data exactly the terms the user typed in the search can be found because semantically similar words from the Thesaurus are incorporated in the search.
- Document repository. It allows to search for documents (PDFs, images and CSV files) by looking in their metadata and for PDFs in their content (in the documents themselves). Advanced searches and specific filters for document attributes are possible.
- Vocabularies. A list of terms, concepts or entities in the scope of a geoscientific project and how they are semantically related to each other. The vocabularies can include codelists, used to establish the valid values for the attribute, or real world entities (faults, contacts, massifs, etc.) whose relationships are important.
- Multilingual keyword thesaurus. A list of words, terms or concepts, semantically related to each other, that can be used to describe the meaning or main ideas of a dataset. It helps to assign keywords to metadata records using consistent controlled vocabularies and also to get relevant results in data and document searches.
- Metadata catalogue. Central access point to standardised metadata concerning digital structured geological data (spatial datasets or dataset series, spatial data services and web applications) across Europe. Metadata are freely accessible to the public for viewing and searching, but inserting and editing is for authorised users only.
- Map Services and Layers. List of all the map layers accessible on the on the map viewer. It shows whether the layer has metadata and what the current status (is it working) of the corresponding web service is.