The Dutch water board Hunze & Aa’s uses Bolesian’s Geonizer platform for automatically classifying and geo-referencing geotechnical survey results. These surveys are about drilling, coring and sampling of soils. Many thousands of survey reports are available within the water board. Finding the right information is not always easy for the water board’s geotechnical experts. Historical data goes back decades, when digitization of documents and providing proper metadata was not self-evident. As a result keyword search yields huge quantities of irrelevant search results.
Also in the context of the upcoming Environment Act (Omgevingswet), the water board wants to be able to access information based on locations. This can be done, for example, from a GIS (geographic information system) or from a map viewer. Adding geo-data at a document level is not sufficient in this case. Reports often contain information about multiple surveys that have been carried out at different locations. So geo-reference must take place at the level of information within the documents.
This is exactly the purpose of Bolesian’s Geonizer platform. To solve the water board’s problem, the intelligent agents in Geonizer have been trained to determine which documents are relevant, to analyze the information in those documents, extract geo-data and explicitly add the geo-data to the information. Geonizer enables the water board’s geotechnical experts to directly access all relevant research information within documents based on location, resulting in a huge efficiency improvement in the work of the experts.