The geological map of Italy 1:100,000 scale INSPIRE harmonised

The INSPIRE Directive institute a European infrastructure for spatial information to support the environmental policies of the European Union. In the mainframe of the Directive, 34 different themes that represents different environmental information has been identified. One of this is the Geology theme; it is split into three subthemes and represent a "reference data theme” because it provides basic knowledge on the physical properties and composition of rocks and sediments, their structure and their age as represented in geological maps, as well as geomorphological features.

In the feature catalogue of the INSPIRE application schema Geology has been defined the term lists for the information types. Some of these are fully compliant with the features defined in the 1:100.000 scale geological map database and are used in the semantic harmonization procedure.

The Geological Map of Italy at 1:100,000 scale is, at present, the most detailed complete geological map of Italy. It consists of a collage of 277 sheets, and it was produced over a period of more than 100 years, with some sheets in two editions. In the late 1990s, it was transformed into a vector database by digitising from raster format. The dataset was revised, integrated, and corrected between 2005-2009 by the Geological Survey of Italy. In 2021-22 the dataset was harmonised according to the INSPIRE and GeoSciML data models.

The whole area has been subdivided into three different .gml format dataset on geographic base: Northern, Central and Southern Italy.