By: Paul Gorman
The best technologies should capture value now, not down the line, and free-up geoscientists for creative thinking.
That’s the view of Seequent’s Segment Director, Mining, Dr Janina Elliott, who recently chatted with Mining International Director Rob Tyson in a Dig Deep The Mining Podcast episode on ‘The Emerging Ideas Set to Shape Mining’.
Elliott explained how geological data is managed across the sector, why many geoscientists still spend a lot of their time wrangling datasets, and how new technologies, AI, and machine learning can turn complex subsurface information into almost immediate action.
The podcast also covered the findings of Seequent’s seventh Geoprofessionals Data Management Report.
Seequent Segment Director Dr Janina Elliott
She said more than one-third of geologists working across the mining chain still struggled with ‘data wrangling’. That was one of the report’s insights, and one which hadn’t changed that much over the years.
‘A lot of geoscientists in the field really struggle with the idea of having to spend a predominant amount of their time with data management ultimately, and not being able to think about the problem – to being freed up to be the experts that they could be in order to understand what are the next steps. That is a true issue and that needs to be resolved.’
There needed to be ‘one data source, one truth’, with the ability to ‘tap into that information and interconnect the different parts of the mining chain with each other’.
Seequent’s cloud-based geoscience platform, Evo, did just that and had a phenomenal first year, allowing opportunities for partnership and for different customers to join a connected environment.
Brownfield site exploration often dealt with historical data and Evo’s Driver product focused on that, using algorithms to ascertain new patterns and trends within the data that might not yet have made themselves visible to humans, she said.
A recent case study that supports this is Unlocking latent value: an artificial intelligence reinterpretation of a legacy gold deposit. Evo created a seamless environment in which it was possible to act quickly with quality data, as outlined in the same Unlocking latent value case study.
‘It is that environment that allows us to introduce more AI in future and free up geologists and geoscientists to be able to think about the problems and not become a data-management wrangler.
‘Quite often, a lot of the technologies that were brought out in the past create value but it is realised farther down the chain. That doesn’t really support the exploration space today.’
Freeing-up geologists to be creative and do meaningful work is where the future lies.
‘Geoscientists truly are creative individuals, right? So, the idea is to provide technologies to support them every step of the way,’ Elliott said.