COMMENTARY — Data storage and retrieval

The mining industry faces escalating difficulties in finding new mines in Canada and around the world. Data analysis is a key ingredient in successful exploration programs, particularly with respect to ensuring that data are easily accessible in order to achieve the desired degree of evaluation.

The evaluation of mineral properties requires vast amounts of data, including geological, geophysical and geochemical surveys, sampling data to locate mineralization, ore reserve data to evaluate economic potential and structural data to define mine design. Considerable time is spent gathering these data . . .

The situation presented a prime opportunity for the “information technology” industry, which has succeeded in making many product offerings easier to use, within various economic sectors. However, mining-specific software offerings have not always kept pace. Analysis software has advanced far beyond the stage of colored pencils and paper basemaps, but technology capable of storing and retrieving data has been slow to follow.

In the 1970s, mainframe computers provided extensive data storage capacity and integrated mapping tools . . . The advent of microcomputers in the early-to-mid-1980s offered a viable computing solution for most mining companies. Computer Aided Drafting and Design (CADD) packages followed shortly thereafter . . . In the late 1980s and early 1990s, mining companies found they had to design their own extensive data-handling procedures in order to expand the “functionality” of their vendor-supplied CADD applications. This often proved expensive.

Many companies stored copies of exploration data in numerous formats in order to make use of different analysis tools and mapping technologies. The mining industry was faced with the prospect of either engineering its data for each new technology or forcing its CADD vendors to provide more flexible interfaces.

As a result of pressure from customers, CADD vendors are now standardizing interface products, particularly the data storage and retrieval systems. This standardization enables the mining industry to benefit from the many improvements brought about with regard to making data more accessible and manageable, as achieved by Regional Database Management Systems . . .

— From a recent issue of “The Mining Letter” of Coopers & Lybrand Consulting, based in Vancouver, B.C.