DATAMINE: A MINERAL RESOURCE EVALUATION PACKAGE 'S. HENLEY and W. P. C. STOKES {Introduction The last few years have seen revolutionary changes in ‘computer hardware, with development simultaneously Ol itwexpensive, physically small but powerful processors, of cheap memory and mass. storage devices, and of effective colour graphic display and hardcopy devices, With these hardware developments has come also a degree ot de facto standardisation of ‘computer operating systems undreamed of only ten Yyears ago, with CP/M, MSDOS (and its IBM variant PCDOS), and Unix daminant for small, medium, anc larger ‘microcomputers respectively. Technical applications software, however, has lagged far behind {in contrast with games and commercial software). The results have been that tmeny snining and exploration ‘organisations have acquired microcomputers and so: called ‘general-purpose’ database_and spreadsheet progrems without any clear idea of how these would be Used by their geologists and engineers. During the sixties and seventies a stable pattern developed for exploration and mining las in most other industries), in which the data processing department, oF 2 computer-lterate individual would oversee "all Computer usage on 2 relatively large maintrame ‘computer shared by all departments in the organisation. ‘hs would involve maintenance of a library of relevant software, plus development ad hoc -project by project ‘of new interface programs, special ceport generators, land the like, as well as supervsion of a central date bank which was quite commonly a set of filing cabinets, containing decks of punched cards, A few ‘organisations rosea litte above this situation with team ovelapment of more powerful coftware epacifically to Teet 9 range of related needs. Noteworthy among these wore the RTZ suite of orebody modeling and pit design programs, Selection Trust's ORPHEUS system, the various Control ata systems for mining ‘applications, Mintec’s MEDSYSTEM, and the UK. Natural Environment’ Research Counci's G-EXEC ‘system originally daveloped for geological data handling ‘ith strong emphasis on exploration geochemistry. All Of these systems were developed on and for large mainframe computers operating in batch mode. That one have been successfully transferred to ‘microcomauters reflects the grest differences between the two types of computer. ‘Among the first true ‘desktop’ microcomputers 10 become avaiable in the late seventies were the special- purpose machines for technical applications such as the Tektronix 4061 range and the Hewlett Packard 9645 range, These machines were similar in that they operated purely in the BASIC language, which the manufacturers had extended to take advantage of particular hardware features and to provide some of the facilites (e.g. file handling) of an operating system. These computers had medium to high resolution graphic displays and lent themselves to. the evelopmont of highly interactive graphically oriented ‘deposit evaluation and mine planning software. A great deal of effort was expended in developing visually ‘sppealing and complex packages for such machines. Programs and packages included NISOMI, developed at Nottingham University to assist in opaque mineral identification, the SIGMA system for multi-seam ‘deposit evaluation, written by Mineral industries Computing Ltd for Golder Associates, and the Geomin suite of geotechnical and mine evaluation software ‘developed in Canada in Hewlett Packard BASIC. Untor tunately, these early microcomputers proved something of a deod end. Although commercially successtul in {heir restricted market, they were overtaken by general purpose micros produced by companies lke Apple and Commodare, and of course the IBN PC and clones, Such computers ran undar general purpose operating systems and offered 2 wide range ul standard programming languages including COBOL, FORTRAN and PASCAL, as well as mare standard (less extended) Varieties of BASIC. Already Tektronix have effectively Tendered obsolete their own flavour of BASIC by ‘adopting the standard Microsoft BASIC language in their newer computers. Thus by the early eightes, microcomputer hardware of great power and vorsatity ‘was available to the mining industry very cheaply, but ‘without any celevant technical applications software to drive it. There was of course patchy development of Special purpose programs to run alongside the general purpose database and spreadsheet systems but what ‘was required was the development of a comprehensive suite of ‘software for applications ranging from exploration, through reserve estimation, to mine planning (long-term and short-term) and mineral processing. Such development could be achieved in 2 ‘corsisient imenner only by 2 team dedicated to the tack, and not dictated by the unpredictable immediate requirements of particular projects. The remainder of this paper is concerned mainly with fone such development - the DATAMINE system of Mineral Industries Computing Limited, of London, currently installed at the Camborne School of Mines lund @ tange of mining and consultancy organisations worldwide. Development Criteria To start afresh with development of a complete software systern to run on a new type of computer has its atractions and frustrations. Freedom to adopt a new set of design criteria must be one of the more attractive aspects. llowever, many of the functions porformed ‘wil necessarily be dono in ways that ‘reinvent the ‘wheel’, Fortunately, members of the DATAMINE development team had all participated in development fof previous ‘wheels’ and could build upon tat cexporience, ‘The reason for bath the need and the opportunity 10 develop new exploration and mining software on) ‘microcomputers was quite simple: existing software packages had lacked sufficient flexibilty to be transferred from the mainframe environment in which they hed been Uuveloped, ‘Flexibility’ can be taken to include the following aspects: Ai) program language - non-standard languages friltata against transfer, and even the use af computer” manufacturars’ extensions 10 otherwise standard languages cause severe problems in moving programs to different ‘computers, (i) program - structure - old-style monolithic programs are difficult to understand and raintain, let alone convert to different (and smaller] Computers. Iii) program usage - the conversion from batch- ‘mode to interactive computing is non-trivial and frequently demands total restructuring of tne software. In some cases it has been attempted(with little success) by development of interactive front-end programs which merely prepare a batcn job stream to run an unmodified Applications package, liv! program size - slthough microcomputers are ow. becoming available with maintrame- equivalent random access memory capecity, their disk capacity is stil relatively low, and speed particularly of input/output operations and floating-point computation severly limits ‘throughput of large programs. ‘To avoid similar transfer problems in the future with a new system to be developed, and to maxiise transterabilty among the very wide variety of computers now available, would therefore necessitate ‘adapting the following desian criteria (i) use of @ standard and widely implemented programming language (i) highly modular programming for ease of maintenance, updating, and subsequent transfer to other computers i). buittin choice of baich and interactive styles of program usage (iv) restrition of individual programs to single tasks ‘to minimise program size. However, to set down design criteria of this sort before saying what exactly lor avon generally) the new software system is intended to do, isto put the cart well {and truly before the horse. For the purposes of exploration and mining, there are many areas in which the numerical speed and storage ‘capacity af computers are valuable or even essential For oxample, the handing end processing - right ‘through to trial interpretation - of geophysical data is an area which has been intensively developed in computer ‘applications for particular Use by the petroleum Industry In mineral exploration, geophysical techniques are less widely used then geological and geochemical Genlogieal mapping by remote sensing including Cordinary air photograph interpretation) and by ground based field work contributes data of widely varying types, in unpredictable quantities and qualities, and ina Iiature of graphical, numeric, deccriptive, and subjective notes. Some of these data could be retrieved tnd handled conveniently by computer - increasingly so with foreseeable dovolopments in portable scientific ‘workstation computers. - but would require sophisticated data capture and database management techniques, The feal benefits will come with development of appropriate knowledge-based learning systems which will be able to assist the geologist in raking his interpretations from the available data. At present, however, computer assistance to the field feologist has been found useful only in specialised reas: the ‘field notebook’ hand-held computer has been tried a number of times with varying degrees of success; structural geological data are frequently processed by computer, with automated production of Stereographic net plots, display of maps, and statistical analyses. It is in ggocherical exploration where Gomputer techniques hava been found of the greatest Value 50 far. This is because the data are numeric, are gonerated in large volumes, and the processing Fequirements are well defined: univariate and divariate Statistics, histogams and cumulative frequency plots, scatter plots of one variable against another, and a variety of types of mao of raw or smoothed data Research applications also add multivariate statistics, ‘actor and/or cluster analysis to this list but, in general such methods are not found necessary by the practising exploration geochemist For pre.tcasibilty exploration and evaluation studies, much of the avaiable deta 's derived from alholes. Important information gathered here is concerned with the dhifhole itself (location, depth, survey data), with yen and saam intersections, one or more sets of assayed sample data over corresponding or different imervals, downhole measurements (e.g. caliper log, dipmete’, and geophysical datal, and with other data fort time-to-time, such as pump tests in water woll. The management and combination of such disparate data sets require both poworful database faciities and more specialised drihole data processing techniques, To put all such data into consistant torm for further applications Isuch as geostatistics) commonly requires Compositing, which again is not a simple task in view of, the potentially complex geometric interelationships of dithole data To proceed fram drilhole data to initial or detailed reserve estimation requifes further stages. Even if fnoles are svenly spaced within a homogeneous ‘deposit, with constant size samples, an averaging stop Would be required and the deposit volume must be computed. For non-idesl cases, selective retrieval to ‘obtain only samples within the mineralised zone, followed by. geostatistical evaluation, wil more commonly be needed. In complex three-dimensional deposit it will usualy be found nocessary to generate a ogular or irregular block model even for preliminary evaluations. This will require the use of interpolation techniques ranging from simple ‘nearest-neighbour interpolation and simple distance-weightedmuving ‘averages to one oF more types of kriging: a prerequisite for these iS the inclusion of software for variogram rstimation, enabling the user to adopt suitable Variogram models to control interpolation by the chosen kriging method. Reserve evaluation itself is almost always constrained geometrically, by Usposit limits, mineabie seam thickness, lease bounderies, intersection of the topographic surface with the orebody, and maximum depth of extraction, as well a5 limits imposed by particular open pit or underground mining methods and ‘geotechnical criteria such as siope stability or water influx, A system for deposit evaluation should allow, as flexibly ae possible, the inclusion and sunesposition of such contraints aswell as providing for partial evaluations (for example, on a bench-by-bench basis) fand classificaiton by rocktype of other criteria. The Inclusion of geometric contraints is most easily ‘accomplished by digitisation directly from plans and sections provided. It is of course necessary also to rovide outout graphic facilities to show the particular ccontraints used and their relationship with the deposit. “The most important requirement of all, because itis needed et all stages, is for 2 poworful and versatile means of manipulating date without the need tor ‘Special interface programming or indeed for any re: programming to cater for new projects end new types Gf data. This is most really achieved by the use of database system methodology. Of the types ot database management system that have been oveloped, the ralatinnal modal is by far the most ‘general and displays the greatest ability to cope with \edely varying and Unpredictable types and volumes of ata, ‘The foregoing parayraphs describe broedly the areas which should be covered by the new microcomputer- based system for exploration and deposit evaluation. There are other related applications which are also incorporated into the OATAMINE software developed by MICL but they are beyond the scope of this paper.The set of application areas 10 be included constitutes the most basic design specification far the new software: all other design criteria contfol the way in ‘which these applications will be provided, Thus the design criteria identified above can be made more ‘specific in the ight of the applications requirements Ai) programming language : the applications are fessontially technical with emphasis on both numeric computation and databace management, but also the need for input and ‘output graphics. The numeric requirements eliminate COBOL whose computational power 's poor. PASCAL 1s a well-structured language with a defined standard (like ALGOL before tt but has not been implemented sufficiently ‘widely to be acceptable. The same comments might be made of PL/1 and C also. BASIC is Stil not sufficintiy standardised, and even though compilers are now available las opposed 10 the normal interpreters which are very slow because they translate BASIC programs to ‘machine code every time they are executed), the language itslf, in its more standard forrs, is insufficently structured to be suitable for evelopment of large, complex, and general systems. FORTRAN is @ powerful language, Intended specifically for technical applications. ‘and has been standardised (though the two ifferent FORTRAN standards, 66 and 77, are not entirely compatible), and has both subroutine ard function modularsation 3s at essential feature. The age of the language itself does not deter the majority of presentday scientific and technical users from working in FORTRAN, and does mesn thet highly ‘optimised compilers are available. Furthermore, FORTRAN, unlike BASIC, is available on most mainframe’ and minicomputers and allows maximum possibilities of ttansterring software between them {i Modularity of programs is one feature of the ‘structured programing’ metnodology which hhas been widely adopted because of the obvious advantages of writing just once a piece ff code to perform @ particular function and then to call it as a single entity every time the function is required. Small modules with simple structure are easy to write, to maintain, and to modify, {iil To allow for both batch and interactive styles of processing requites the addition of another ‘applications facility - the macro command file, ‘oF macro for short. A macro is meray a series of system input items {commands and data) including commands ta run other macros. Such 8 macro facility will effectively provide batch mode computing as it bypasses the necessity for any user interaction within or between processes which would be expected in the Formal interactive made of operation, (iv) Restriction of programs to single tasks : one command (or one menu selection should ‘activate 2 single logical process - for example, sorting @ file, plotting a map, or computing & variogram. This process constitutes one program in the system, Such structuring implies ‘hat data will be passed from one process to the ‘next through stored files, and processes will be insulated from each other. A failure in one process will not be propagated to others as ‘might al 100 easily happen in a more complex or ‘monolithic program structure. ‘The Datamine System MICL wes founded in 1961 as en independent ‘company to develop and market microcomputer-based mining softwere. The DATAMINE system, the first reloase of which included the features identified above, together with open-pit mine design, not only masts those identified needs but also provides a framework on which to build additional applications programs. ‘The cove of DATAMINE a datahase management system with a complete set of relational operations: provided as separately callable programs. The user can ‘ocess the system either through commands ~ with interactive definition of files, fields, and parameters required - or in the current release by means of a menu, The menu itself is merely a special case of a macro command file which takes advantage of special processes to provide interection {in an otherwise non: interacting sequence) and substitute symbolic itoms within the macro by actual values. Also part of the ‘core’ DATAMINE system are sets of system utlity programs (such as directory listing) and input/output programs which allow input of new data and transfer of| files between DATAMINE and other systems or between one DATAMINE user and another. ‘Around these core progrems are built the various applications packages - for statisies, and ttansformations, graphics, geostatistics, model {generation and manipulation, drilhole deta processing, interactive graphical editing and pit evaluation design. For a system such as this 10 be widely useful to exploration geologists and mining engineers, it must be inteligible without tho noed for such users to acquire specialised computing skills otherwise irelovant to their ‘work. itis vital that a geologist roturning to the office, possibly after a long field season, be able rapidly to take contro! of his data in the computer. Even if the microcomputer is based in a field office, it is stil Important thar its use should pe as painiess as possible, with the fewest possible barriers between the user and his data. For this reason, DATAMINE provides a choice fof menu-mode or ' command-mode operation. Furthermore, by defining programs invoked by system ‘commands at the lagcal or geological’ function lave, the user can easily construct his own processing flowcharts from the geological roquiroments thet he knows without needing any knowledge of, say, sorting ‘algorithms or database optimisation, Indeed it is possible for the user to operate DATAMINE entirely as a succession of ‘biack boxes’ pput together in the order that he needs. For those (many! geologists who would be oiscouraged at the Sight of a prescribed complex flowchart. DATAMINE ‘can be run as a system without flowcharts, The {geologist can do anything he likes with his data, within the system's capebilties, even if the results ate total nonsense, What happens in practice, of course, is that the geologist builds his own procedures and flowcharts based on his particular requitements, from the basic "puilding block’ processes offered by DATAMINE. The » rolatively simple programs within the DATAMINE systom thus can be used to construct ‘complex processing sequences. This, in fact, is the ‘essence of microcomputing - to perform complex tasks as a succession of simple tasks each within the Capabilities of the machine. With suitable design, constraints on problem size are relaxed, and the time penalty (for example an overnight run on a ‘microcomputer as compared with an overnight wait for a five-minute run on a mainframe bureau computer) is perceived as irrelevant oF, at worst, bearable. For the ‘geologist in the field, of course, access to mainframe computers can be difficult, unreliable and much moreexpensive than use of 2 microcomputer and wil theratore frequently be tuled out purely on economic ‘grounds. Some features of a system like DATAMINE installad in dedicated microcomputer are even more expensive to provide on a central mainframe or multi-user rminicomputer. For example, interactive graphics s notoriously demanding of machine resources, and is best provided by stand-alone graphics warestations like the Apollo Domain, the ICL Pera, or the DEC VAX station. These are, indeed, no more than particularly ‘powerful microcomputers with high resolution screens, ‘and 1M have recently bridged the gap between these fend the more conventional microcomputer with the PC/AT and its range of medium and high resolution ‘graphics monitors. In 2 stuation of rapidly evolving computer hardware, itis the most flexible software peckages which provide Continuity for the technical user - the exploration or ‘ining pratessional - wha does not wish to re-.earn his ‘computing at the end of each field season when @ new ‘generation of computer hardware becomes available Packages such as DATAMINE are written with such exiility 2s 31 ior tent design criterion. By comparison with eater microcomputer softwere for exploration and mining applications, DATAMINE is comprehensive and powerful in that it provides the capability in principle to handle applications previously carried out only on much larger and more expensive computers: it contains relational database management systems it includes a range of geostatistical programe; Figure 1. Horizont! soe through threo-cimensicnal prototype ‘moe Set up for zonal mspolaign ul ela oocunng in ‘Soparate foult bounded seas -2ree. -soe0.8 4200.08 -3580.0 its interactive graphical processes provide direct feammunication with the database for editing and teveluation; and regional or local block models i two oF three dimensions may be generated by 2 selection of methods, with model size limited only by the disk space available ‘As an indication of the capabilities of such a microcomputer based systom, Figures 1 & 2 show 3 slice through a prototype model created for zonal modeling and pits designed using the interactive ‘graphical pit design program and stored as perimeter library files within the database These were generated on an ICL Pau, & rmicroprocessor-based graphics workstation, and on an IBM PC/AT. It is quite obvious that in their frst ten years, microcomputers have progressed from little more than desk calculators to machines with than most mainframe computers had in the early seventies. A combination of this processing power with 2 new gonoration of geological eoftware to take ‘advantage of microcomputer architecture and the highly interactive mode of use, plus the physical rabustness of many of the new machines (particularly the ‘iranspartabies') should revolutionise tne ‘geologists or engineer's opinion and actual use of ‘computer methods, given software specialised in the felevant application areas that is accessible with minimum of required training, 'S. Hentev and W. P. C. Sroxes are Directors of Mineral Industries Computing Limited. KEY SCALE VARIABLE: area Fron ES OC * EMSDSSSSHES 2122. oe