42 Mining Magazine January / February 2009

TAGLINEMANAGEMENT IN ACTION – GIS SOFTWARE

A GEOGRAPHICA GEOGRAPHICA Information System (GIS) is defined by one of the market leaders, A is defined by one of the market leaders, A ESRI, as a tool that “integrates hardware, A ESRI, as a tool that “integrates hardware, A software, and data for capturing, A software, and data for capturing, A managing, analysing and displaying all A managing, analysing and displaying all A

forms of geographically referenced information”. The GIS is most familiar in the form of displaying

intelligent maps that show a range of data graphically, or in point form, related to the Earth’s surface. An example might be coloured contours showing rainfall levels on a 3D relief map. In mining and mineral exploration terms, the potential is endless.

There are a number of providers of GIS-linked or -based solutions, all of which have relevance to the mining industry, but there are important distinctions to be made between the roles of the various firms.

The core vendors of GIS technology, sometimes referred to as desktop GIS, are undisputedly ESRI, headquartered in Redlands, California, with its ArcGIS range, and Troy, New York-headquartered MapInfo with its suite of the same name, which was founded in 1986 but has been part of Pitney Bowes since 2007. Although mining only represents a small proportion of their total sales – competing with other industries such as petroleum, transport, defence, forestry and agriculture – the industry is very much a focus and growing market for them.

There are two main types of GIS data: vector GIS, where the basic data is vector-based and represented in the form of co-ordinates; and raster GIS, which involves the use of spatial data, not in the form of points, but expressed as a matrix of cells or pixels.

The ESRI and MapInfo products are based on vector GIS, but also host and display raster GIS data through add-on modules. In the minerals and mining sector, ESRI has tended to dominate the GIS market in the US, whereas MapInfo has been the desktop GIS preference of the international mining/minerals community, especially in Australia and Canada.

The strengths of ArcGIS are its integration with database, server and internet technologies. The introduction of exploration extensions for ArcGIS, such as Geosoft’s Target for ArcGIS, has filled a

functionality gap for mining companies by providing the ability to easily process and visualise their subsurface data. MapInfo is popular because of its greater ease of use and tie-in with Encom Discover as a subsurface add-on.

There are many similarities between GIS and CAD software, with CAD focused on engineer-ing applications with high precision and accuracy. The GIS industry works on a much larger scale and is mapping focused. These similarities have led to integration. Bentley Systems, a provider of CAD-based engineering solutions, has a mining and metals group whose products are used to make 3D models for modular construction and visualisation of mine sites and processing plants.

A group of other companies such as ERDAS (ERMapper), Clark Labs (IDRISI), ITT Vis (ENVI) and PCI Geomatics specialise in spatial-imaging applications, which are also important GIS products, but are

mainly used to process geospatial satellite imagery and remote-sensing data. Finally, there are groups aimed at providing specific mining solutions, such as the ability to integrate mining/minerals-specific surface or subsurface data into core GIS products. Examples include Geosoft, RockWare and Encom.

Brett Merritt, managing director, software, at Pitney Bowes Business Insight, summarises some of the applied distinctions as follows: “The

main areas where the products from these vendors differ is in their core capability. Mining applications are still best at solving mining problems such as mine planning, resource estimation and scheduling. Image-processing platforms such as ER Mapper, IDRISI and PCI Geomatics are best at image processing. And the two main GIS platforms – MapInfo and ESRI – work best at solving GIS problems. Today, the vendors of each of these platforms are working harder to make their products more compatible through supporting open standards and focusing on solving business problems for their users. It’s still very much a case of picking the best tool for the task at hand.”

The mine-planning and design sector, and companies such as Maptek, Gemcom and Datamine, retain their important market niche as it such as specific area, incorporating complex, geostatistical calculations and geological data in the production of block models, mine designs and orebody structures.

As the market has evolved, however, the level of overlap between offerings in terms of spatial representation has risen. Those firms offering products traditionally focused on spatial image processing have expanded them to incorporate more GIS-like

Paul Moore looks at how the mining industry utilises GIS platforms from the perspective of the providers

GIS – a mine of information

Target for ArcGIS isosurface (above) and geology (below)

Geosoft fence diagram display

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January / February 2009 Mining Magazine 43

MANAGEMENT IN ACTION – GIS SOFTWARE

capabilities. Likewise, the mining-planning specialists have made their software more compatible with core GIS platforms. Generally, the two main core GIS providers have sought to support the mine-planning software groups and ensure users can move various types of data between different formats, whether 2D or 3D, as efficiently as possible.

MARKET REVIEWIn terms of the mining industry, the following summarises some of the main products and market positions of the principal players. As far as the customers are concerned, mineral exploration has traditionally been the stronghold of GIS software use for regional-scale geological and minerals occurrence mapping, both in the field and as a management communication tool for prospect funding.

Operational mines have long used GIS, but in specific areas such as environmental management and geotechnical engineering. One reason for the initial domination of use by the exploration sector is that downstream applications generally require larger, upfront investments and turnkey solutions, whereas the GIS applications for exploration are accessible to the individual user. The minerals industry was also slower to adopt GIS technology, relative to the environmental and oil/gas industries.

More recently, GIS’s applicability has become much broader, leading to the already mentioned partner-ships with firms providing mining-focused solutions that complement the core GIS offering. ESRI believes that, eventually, the industry will move towards solutions integration and a holistic, spatial, data-management path for mine data, from first exploration to production, remediation and final divestiture.

ESRIESRI describes its ArcGIS platform as a ‘complete GIS suite’, providing a range of software tools from sophisticated desktop GIS functionality with extensions to spatial analysis, 3D, geo-statistics, server-based data management and geo-processing that leverage Oracle or SQLServer type databases. It also offers lightweight, web-based, client-deployment capabilities, including ArcGISExplorer, which allows users to combine local data with web services to create custom maps. The latest ArcGIS variant is 9.3, launched in 2008.

ESRI supplies its core GIS products, which include ArcView, as well as added functionality versions such as ArcEditor and ArcInfo, to many of the global mining majors, but it has a strong group of business partners that have developed a wide array of workflow-oriented mining solutions, which in part leverage the ESRI plat-form. These include Geosoft’s mining exploration offer-ing Target for ArcGIS, Spatial Dimension’s FlexiCadastre (for land management), Runge’s Mining Dynamics (mine scheduling), ITT Vis ENVI (image management and processing), acQuire (assay database) and RockWare RockWorks (subsurface boreholes).

ESRI and Geosoft have signed a global business

partner agreement that focuses on the mineral exploration market and Geosoft is building next-generation solutions using GIS technologies from ESRI to meet the needs of explorers.

On the subject of how the mining industry uses ArcGIS products, ESRI natural resource industries manager Geoff Wade tells Mining Magazine: “It is common at many mining companies for initial GIS deployments to be simple, desktop-oriented ArcView tools for mineral exploration. However, in many of the majors’ corporate policy dictates or the pressure of multiple, competing project demands, much of the project information to be replicated back to HQ and actively shared on the corporate intranet.

“ESRI has worked with many of the majors to deploy our server-based technology to handle

global, corporate data replication and availability. More recently, mining companies have been ‘spatialising’ their corporate internet ‘knowledge portals’, and using GIS as both a ‘front-end’ access map to the available data and a ‘spatial metadata index’ on their corporate holdings.”

MAPINFO AND ENCOMWhile MapInfo is the core GIS product in its latest Professional 9.5 variant, towards the end of 2007 Pitney Bowes MapInfo bought Encom Technology, the Sydney, Australia-based provider of Discover and Discover 3D. Mr Merritt comments: “These products are specifically designed to leverage the power of MapInfo Professional and expand its capability to solve highly complex problems that are unique to the needs of these industries.”

In addition to Discover, Encom produces: ‘Model-Vision Pro’, a world-class, potential field-modelling product; Encom PA, a geosciences data-integration

and interpretation solution; and Compass Enterprise, a spatial data-management platform.

The main difference between MapInfo and Encom Discover in market terms is that mining/minerals has historically been Encom’s largest market, followed by petroleum whereas MapInfo, like ESRI products, is used across a huge number of large industries requiring visualisation and interpretation of spatial data.

Since the first release of Encom Discover 16 years ago, the company states that it has seen the offering evolve from being a tool used almost entirely by mineral-exploration geologists to a core platform used by a much broader set of mining customers. Encom believes this reflects improvements in the software’s capability and the more prominent role that GIS is taking in the day-to-day business process.

Recent mining industry examples include the use of Discover Mobile at Sunrise Dam for efficient in-pit geological mapping directly into a digital system, plus using Discover to take this data through to Maptek Vulcan. Another was Sentinel Pty Ltd’s use of Discover 3D to model waterbodies and assess siltation issues for a coal-mine customer in Queensland, Australia.

The latest news at Encom is a merger with all the other software acquisitions made by Pitney Bowes since 2000, including MapInfo, Group One, GDC and Axiom GIS (France), to form a new, global software group called Pitney Bowes Business Insight.

ERDAS AND ER MAPPERER Mapper Professional is the core ERDAS product in mining as it provides the highest functionality directly applicable to analysing and exploiting the types of data used in mining, and is best described as a powerful but simple-to-use geospatial imagery-processing application. It enhances data to make it more meaningful, such as highlighting the different mineral and sedimentation layers in a satellite image.

But, other products are also applicable to mining. Ian Anderson, product line director, remote sensing at ERDAS, tells Mining Magazine: “ERDAS IMAGINE provides geospatial tools with a higher degree of capability than is offered by ERDAS ER Mapper, including the ability to ortho-rectify satellite and aerial imagery. A great number of file formats can be interchanged, and it has more extensive vector editing and analysis capabilities, as well as the ability to design custom geospatial-analysis tools, hyper-spectral and other advanced classification techniques, as well as the ability to interpolate continuous, gridded surfaces from large point data sources.”

The highest tier of ERDAS IMAGINE – IMAGINE Professional – is now provided to all ERDAS ER Mapper users with software maintenance contracts.

ERDAS has had ties with ESRI that go back to the founding of both firms. Traditionally, ERDAS provided raster support for ESRI and relied on its vector functionality. The firm told Mining Magazine that it continues to provide the highest level of support for the ESRI ArcGIS platform, with comprehensive testing

GIS – a mine of information

RockWorks drillhole data

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Mining Magazine 444444 Mining Magazine January / February 2009January / February 2009January / February 2009

MANAGEMENT IN ACTION – GIS SOFTWARE

on the recent ArcGIS 9.3 release. ERDAS said it will continue developing and selling the ArcGIS extensions as the products meet a market need.

Encom Technology routinely uses ERDAS ER Mapper for its international mineral and petroleum exploration projects. Its 3D capabilities have greatly improved Encom’s ability to understand datasets in areas of significant topographic relief. In gold exploration, RCG Exploration uses ERDAS ER Mapper to enhance magnetic images, integrate different datasets on a single image, enhance Landsat TM data using band rationing, display multiple datasets simultaneously, rectify scanned aerial photos and add vector annotation on an image.

ERDAS is part of Hexagon, a global technology group with strong market positions in measurement technologies. Hexagon also includes several Leica Geosystems companies, so there are synergies as some areas of Leica Geosystems are involved in projects deal-ing directly with the 3D visualisation of mining areas.

GEOSOFTGeosoft has provided exploration software and solutions for the mining industry since 1986. Geosoft software provides capabilities for analysis, manage-ment, 3D visualisation and mapping of surface and subsurface exploration data, including geophysics, geology and geochemistry.

Louis Racic, director of product management tells Mining Magazine: “We help mining companies to

integrate and leverage the capabilities of GIS within their exploration project workflow.”

The firm believes that a key difference between itself and the broader-based GIS technology providers is its focus on providing workflows and tools that are optimised specifically for earth exploration. Geosoft software is widely used in the mining and petroleum industries, as well as for mining and petroleum industries, as well as for environmental and other sub-surface environmental and other sub-surface exploration applications.

Mr Racic comments: “Our mining customers have told us they find it easy to use Geosoft as their corporate exploration platform because we’re able to bring in information from any of the main GIS and resource systems used in exploration. Geosoft is able to seamlessly integrate data from MapInfo, ArcGIS, AutoCAD and a wide MapInfo, ArcGIS, AutoCAD and a wide range of satellite data imagery. It also range of satellite data imagery. It also supports most of the mine-resource planning packages. It’s very flexible in that respect.”

Oasis montaj, Geosoft’s core earth-mapping platform, is used extensively for advanced geophysics and geochemical data processing, analysis, quality control and modelling. Geosoft has continued to build on this exploration platform with the introduction of a geospatial globe viewer, data server and cataloging technologies (Geosoft Dap Server), as well as

professional services to support the delivery of exploration information management solutions.

Geosoft has worked to improve the connectivity and interoperability of its exploration software applications – Oasis montaj and Target – by embedding ESRI ArcGIS Engine technologies in its software platform. “With our latest software release,

explorers have greater flexibility and control in explorers have greater flexibility and control in achieving the project and interpretation achieving the project and interpretation

results they need within a single platform. Our strong strategic partnership and technology integra-tion with ESRI has enabled us to make milestone improvements in workflow and productivity – meeting our customers’ require-ment to share data easily between their Geosoft and ESRI application environments,” says Mr Racic.

Geosoft has also developed Geosoft has also developed exploration extension software for the ESRI exploration extension software for the ESRI

ArcGIS environment. Target for ArcGIS is used by Vale, Teck Cominco and other mining companies to bridge the gap between their GIS and exploration needs. It handles all subsurface-exploration requirements, from visualising single holes at the start of a project to creating and updating sections, and finally generating 3D models that can be integrated with mine-resource software. In the March quarter of 2009, Geosoft will release Geochemistry for ArcGIS; a software extension that will extend explorers’ toolkit within GIS by providing the ability to analyse their geochemical data within their ArcGIS environment.

ROCKWARERockWare is a leading distributor for the ESRI and MapInfo/Encom desktop GIS products, but also supplies its own solution, RockWorks, which focuses on the visualisation of spatial data from subsurface, including drillhole logs, stratigraphic profiles and cross-sections. This is in

contrast to ArcGIS products, which are focused on surface spatial-data analysis and visualisation, so there is a good fit between them.

There is some overlap in that ArcGIS 3D Analyst provides some subsurface visualisation and

RockWorks has a number of tools for surface-data spatial analysis and mapping, but overall they work well in combindation. RockWorks can export 3D Shapefiles for visualisation in 3DAnalyst. Also, RockWare GIS Link installs as a toolbar into ArcMap, importing RockWorks borehole locations into ArcView and offers easy linking of the two

programs for the generation of cross-sections, profiles, fence diagrams, logs, and elevation and isopach contours.

Rockware GIS Link screenshots

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