Many company exploration reports held by an Australian State Geological Survey remained confidential for extended periods of time. Enactment of the “Sunset Clause” amended the Mining Regulation to allow many of these reports to now be made publicly available. 

The historic exploration reports are held electronically as a series of scanned documents in PDF format. While these reports provide some context, they are just images and none of the location, sample or geochemical results are searchable or held as digital data. 

The data for extraction includes:

• Details of the report, including tenement, holder, project, and period 
• Location of drill-holes and surface samples 
• Assay results and metadata from both surface and drilling samples 
• Notes of all exploration activity contained in each report such as geophysical surveys, field mapping and geology logs.  

The scope of this project is to extract, digitise and validate all exploration data from the scanned reports.  

The entire process consists of:

• Reviewing the reports to determine which data is to be captured.  
• The OCR scanning of documents to extract digital information. 
• Georectification of maps and digitising data points and attributes.  
• Capture of this information into defined templates 
• The importation of this data to a data warehouse.
• Finally a transformation of the database into the client specified schema

Each step contains numerous QC and validation stages. The process is ongoing – with a delivery of the working dataset each month, and a feedback cycle with the client. 

The most important use of these documents is to provide modern explorers with information on historic exploration and mining activities.   Data gathered in historic exploration projects will be in a format suitable for inclusion in a database which is available to the public. This will enable future exploration projects to access and use data gathered by previous landholders.

We continue to provide high quality datasets to the Geological Survey, which they in turn release to the public. Our systems continue to improve to increase throughput and enhance the capture detail and metadata on the reports. We add value to the project with advice and discussion to the client when especially difficult data is encountered. This collaborative approach has ensured a successful partnership that continues to grow. 

To date we have supplied robust validated drilling and geochemistry data from over 1000 reports.