The Resources Information System (RIS) is a freely accessible web portal providing data on occurrences and quarries of mineral resources of Switzerland. This includes data on gravel, sand, cement raw materials, brickyard raw materials, crushed stone, natural stone, gypsum and salt, all of which currently extracted in Switzerland. Furthermore, the RIS also contains data on currently not produced mineral resources like energy resources and metals.
The RIS point data originate from numerous surveys carried out by the Swiss Geotechnical Commission (SGTK) since its foundation in 1899. SGTK regularly compiled and published reports, maps and books on those georesources data of Switzerland. Since the 1980ies, such data were digitally recorded and migrated into different database systems. Since 2015, those data are transferred to the RIS making them public.
Among others, the RIS is aimed at persons looking for information on the actual and historic occurrences and extraction of mineral resources in Switzerland. The target audience includes the experts from administration, industry and educational institutions as well as interested laymen.
The RIS intends to give a comprehensive overview on the mineral resources of Switzerland. For that reason, small occurrences are documented that are not commerically extractable (e.g. manganese ores) as well as large, commercially important mineral deposits (e.g. cement raw materials).
The information density of these different raw material types is very heterogeneous by nature. For some occurrences (points) there is a lot of information available, for others there are only very few. Due to limited resources, not a all published data in the RIS could be verified and/or updated to the latest status. Thus, there are still some occurrences (points) with an outdated data status or with erroneous information.
The RIS is regularly adjusted with the web portal of the Federal Office of Topography swisstopo map.geo.admin.ch.