Inria and BRGM signed a scientific partnership agreement in December 2022 to investigate the use of digital technologies applied to ground and subsurface issues. One of the challenges identified in this framework is the Augmented Geologist.
BRGM
Geoscientists at BRGM employ various data sources — unstructured, semi-structured, or structured, such as scientific reports, publications, and databases — to enhance their understanding of the area to be studied before starting the field campaign. Although some digital devices are now being used during field trips (e.g., small computers, tablets and other smartphones), 3D terrain modeling activities are only conducted once geologists are back in the office. Reasons for this include: the lack of dedicated tools to effectively support the activity while in the field, and the lack of 3D rendering solutions fast enough to enable instant feedback. In addition, data are encoded and structured in a variety of formats depending on their origin: previous field studies (e.g., currently available maps and models); data gathered during the mission (e.g., physical notebooks, measurements), etc. This makes it difficult to provide geologists with an integrated view on these different data, which in turn impedes their ability to manipulate and make sense of the data and relate them to their observations in the field.
Inria
These challenges raise research questions in the following domains linked to the following Inria teams:
- Data and Knowledge Representation and Processing (CEDAR, Valda): the effective structuring, annotation, semantization, and querying of heterogeneous sources of data, including text, tables of data values, and multimodal (text and image) documents. This needs to be performed in a way that allows traceability of data sources and proper management of the uncertainty in the data, which makes some models (e.g., generative models trained for question answering) inapplicable.
- Geometry and Modeling (GraphDeco, Titane): the creation of geology-aware 3D models from sparse, sometimes ambiguous field annotations, and the fast simulation of geologic structures based on these 3D models.
- Interaction and Visualization (ILDA): the study of visual perception in outdoor augmented reality; the design of situated visualizations that are properly registered with the physical environment; the design of effective interaction techniques, either free-hand or supported by appropriate handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets to query & visualize data as well as input new data on the fly.