MICROMINE’s Geobank has continued its commitment to be the first choice in geological data management solutions by further strengthening its association and involvement with the Australian ‘CoalLog’ Standard. Geobank development team members have been involved in the CoalLog standard since its inception and continue to further integrate Coal Log standards into the Geobank solution.
The CoalLog standard improves the efficiency of collection and transfer of Australian coal exploration data and provides a basis for easier data analysis and training. CoalLog includes data entry sheets and standard code lookup tables for header, drilling, lithology and geotechnical data as well as a format for the transferal of this data. Before CoalLog, approximately 30 different data formats and over 100 different data code translation tables were being used in the capture of geological and geotechnical data throughout the Australian Coal Industry. These different formats, dictionaries, and transferral conventions led to major inefficiencies in the collection, transfer, and analysis of coal borehole data throughout Australia.
The standard was formalised during the period 2010-2012 by three sub-committees (geological, geotechnical, and data transfer) with representatives from most major Australian coal mining, consulting, and software companies. Members of MICROMINE’s Geobank development team played a pivotal role in this process, with Senior Geobank Data Management Specialist Ibo Mango a member of this collaborative panel.
Early involvement in this project, titled the ACARP Project C21003, has enabled MICROMINE to invest considerable time in the development phase of producing a solution to meet the requirements for Borehole Data Logging Standard for the Australian Coal Industry.
This original CoalLog Standard was completed and delivered to industry in February 2012 with financial support from the Australian Coal Research Program (ACARP). The original version has seen many updates and was updated with v1.1 in September 2012, v1.2 in November 2013 and v2.0 in April 2015.
The most recent version, CoalLog v2.0, includes the new features of a Borehole Logging Training Manual, new logging sheets for recording Drilling data and standard plotting patterns for all Lithotypes and Lithology Qualifiers defined in CoalLog.
As part of the integration, MICROMINE’s Geobank team have created a Coal Quality system as an option for Geobank clients, which can perform a reverse despatch in order to get quality data in.
The most common problem with coal data is missing Meta data such as dispatch information, missing samples which have never been entered into the database and missing composites. This process has the ability to fix these errors and upload the data without wasting time.
It can take days or weeks to get this specific dataset in, the Geobank development team have managed to reduce this process down to just hours or minutes which provides real value to coal mining operations.
The coal quality system is also normalized, which means the user can add or remove columns without altering the structure. This makes support and object development much more efficient, as well as removing additional administration tasks from the database administrator.
The New South Wales state government department responsible for archiving coal exploration data has decided to adopt the Standard and will be encouraging companies to provide their data in ‘CoalLog’ format.
Mr Mango commented on the CoalLog integration “The CoalLog Standard forms an important strategic priority for the Geobank team due to the significant benefits it can provide to our clients. We are proud to be at the forefront of the CoalLog standardisation initiative and look forward to assisting to improve efficiencies in coal data management.”
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