Victoria’s secret opens up

Bruce Simons, Senior Information Geologist at GeoScience Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, recently visited GTK to talk about new ways of handling and presenting geological data. Victoria, Australia’s leading gold-producing state, is today a world leader in development of seamless mapping techniques and web-based information delivery.

Breaking Smith’s paradigm

Geologists have long been locked into the map paradigm set forth by William Smith in his 1815 geological map of England, Scotland and Wales. Nearly two centuries after the “map that changed the world,” geological surveys continue to make Smith’s colored map with a legend describing geological units arranged by time and lithology.

Bruce Simons’ message is that maps today need to serve a much wider range of end-users. “What about somebody who wants to predict mudslides, assess groundwater resources or fractures, or look at the 3D structure of a mineral occurrence? As long as we have the data or know how to get it, we should be able to provide maps suited to anybody’s specific needs. Modern mapmaking is a dance; a dialogue between clients and data-gatherers.”

The “coopetition” model

Victoria has been the active for years in development of systems based on Geoscience Mark-Up Language (GeoSciML). The work today, done under the auspices of IUGS Commission on Geological Sciences, it performed by teams at ten national geological surveys, including the US, Japan, UK, Australia, Canada, France and Sweden. “Even this work is mostly limited to delivering information we expect to see on a traditional map. We in Victoria and our Finnish counterparts are interested in extending GeoSciML to things that do not appear on traditional maps such as hydrogeological data.”

Pushing the boundaries of mapping pays off. The surveys in the various Australian states, each seeking to bring in mining investment, have worked together to develop mineral occurrence models. “We call this type of cooperatively competing ‘coopetition.’ Our state surveys promote exploration for minerals and petroleum to international investors, and then compete to bring them to individual states.”

Gold Undercover drives development

Gold is the likely objective of an investor in Victoria, which could have an untapped gold endowment as large as 80 million ounces. The challenge for miners is that much of this potential gold wealth lies beneath 150 meters of basalt. Thus, the software and systems development at GeoScience Victoria are an integral part of the Gold Undercover Initiative. The work proceeds on several fronts, including data capture and analysis, development of an exploration toolkit with possibilities for resource assessment and 3D modeling, as well as Webbased data delivery.

The initiative confronts a common dilemma facing all geological surveys – making data available. After spending decades, even centuries, collecting and archiving masses of geological data, a survey’s geodata could potentially be worth billions of dollars. However, as Ian Jackson, chief of operations at the British Geological Survey, remarks, “Data you can’t find is worth nothing.”

GeoScience Victoria has responded with a line of seamless geology products and ways to create and manage geodata in new IT environments. Traditional plot boundaries on maps were eliminated and current data can be scaled up or down between the key scales of 50k, 250k, 1M and 4M.

Getting agreement on terms

“While I disagree with Ernest Rutherford’s view that physics is the only real science and the rest is just stamp-collecting, I can concede that some geologist behavior still resembles stampcollecting. We never thought much about what we kept in our collection boxes. If we wanted to see a sample, we’d just pick up the box, shake it out and have a look. But with the advent of computers, which make it much easier to exchange geological data, we suddenly have to be able to determine if samples of the same mineral in two places are equivalent, and if not, how they are different.”

“Even if we use the same terms and classification system, how do we know that a term from, say, Finland is the same as this one from, say, Japan? Assuring equivalency requires two things. First, we must have a schematic agreement, which means that each term has its own special place in the lithographic world. Second, there has to be conceptual agreement, so that terms are understood the same way by various user groups. GeoSciML, which comes out of standards published by the Open Geospatial Consortium and several ISO standards, allows us to agree internationally on concepts.”

“For each terms we use a URN, a unique identifier, just as every page on the Web need a unique location identifier, a URL. When you look at foreign map, you simply consult a vocabulary service to identify the equivalent. You do not need the local term for, say, ‘sandstone,’ merely the information that it is indicated by yellow. With that knowledge, it can identify where all the Finnish sandstones are on my map.”

Lessons learned

“We’re a bit farther along in this process than the Finns, so my main advice is to focus on serving your client needs. In our case, those needs derive from the Gold Undercover Initiative. Finnish geology is different and the user-base is different.”

Simons effacingly observes, “We’ve learned a lot of lessons in our work, and part of our Finnish counterparts’ intense interest appears to avoiding some of our earlier missteps.”

TEXT: GREG MOORE