Both of these features will probably alter the way geoscientist do their work in the very near future. The combination of easy access to your data and visual presentation of these data addresses some of the primary difficulties in performing geoscience evaluations. Geosciences, and geology in particular, are visual in nature. The geologist needs to see the outcrop and its spatial relationships to understand its history. This is probably why geoscientists, in general, were not early adopters of computer technology.
Text based input and table based output provides little obvious insight into spacial relationships.
The development of graphical interfaces and good applications for generating graphics have allowed geoscientists to begin using computers to display and understand the spatial relationships that are key to their work. Another fact of geoscience studies is that they usually require field work. Data are not collected in the office or an adjacent lab, but from remote sites away from the office. This separation often leads to delays in getting data from the field and into a usable form. At the same time, transcribing data from field notes into an office database may lead to errors.