Corporate solutions

As large amounts of money are invested in collecting

the data, it is crucial that the data are

safely archived and made available to those

who need them as easily as possible. Integrity

of data is paramount for any mining or exploration

company, both from a technical and

legal viewpoint (acQuire 2004). However this

integrity has often been lacking in the past and

many organizations have had poor systems

giving rise to inconsistencies, lost data, and

errors. Increasingly, in the wake of incidents

such as the Bre-X fraud (see section 5.4), both

industry and government departments require

higher levels of reporting standards. Relational

databases provide the means by which data can

be stored with correct quality control procedures

and retrieved in a secure environment.

Many proprietary technical software products

provide such storage facilities, for example

acQuire (acQuire 2004) provides such a solution

for storage and reporting of data that also

interfaces with files in text formats such as csv,

dif, txt (tab delimited and fixed width formats),

as well as numerous proprietary formats.

The strategy for collection and evaluation

(checking) of data (Walters 1999) is often a matter

of company procedure. Most errors are gross−90

and can be easily filtered out. Each geologist

and mining or processing engineer knows what

the database should contain in terms of ranges,

values, and units. It is a simple matter of setting

up the validation tables to check that the

data conform to the ranges, values, and units

expected. A simple example would be ensuring

that the dip of drillholes is between 0 and

degrees for surface drilling.