Three ways geoscientific data management ensures data integrity
Maintaining the integrity of your geoscientific data is essential for your geology team to make quick and reliable decisions based on trusted information.
Data integrity refers to the accuracy and consistency of the geoscientific data collected on your site, beginning at the point of capture and going all the way to the lab.
Good geoscientific data management helps you maintain your data and derive answers from it in three ways:
- Storing and preserving your original observations and measurements
- Validating the data as it is entered
- Granting the right access to the right people in your organisation.
1. Storing original geological observations and measurements
Data corruption often occurs when moving data into and out of a database. One of the approaches mature geoscientific data software takes to prevent this is to store the original measurements from the field along with contextual information or metadata. This can include:
- the unit of measure
- the instrument used
- the instrument accuracy
- the date recorded.
Your geoscientific data is meaningless without this additional information.
This approach allows you to compare your original data files to your stored record, and immediately verify if your data is right. This capability can be especially useful when undergoing an audit.
Modelling accuracy may be compromised when you convert units, which can impact the rounding and precision of your data further downstream in your mine processes. You can reduce the risk of this error occurring by storing the original information to use for comparison.
Standard transformations are another powerful way of ensuring data integrity. Intelligent databases allow geologists to use the same central, transformation algorithm every time. This prevents geologists trying to work out their own algorithms and business rules, which leads to inconsistent results.
2. Validated data
Starting with clean, validated data is key to maintaining your data integrity. Reliable and quality geoscientific data software should set rules that force users to follow a process to consistently produce a complete, standardised dataset.
Your geoscientific data management software should easily work in conjunction with in-field mobile data capture, like acQuire’s new mobile app, so staff can easily synchronise and integrate data from the field to the central database. Validating your data at point of capture reduces your risk of introducing errors or mismatched data into your database.
Validation in the field helps enforce required values, such as recording drillhole coordinates and ensuring identifiers meet site standards. Error checking and validation intelligence in the field saves time from having to re-collect data at a later stage.
3. Database security and protection
User permissions are a way to keep your database secure. This allows access only to the information your users need and means you can segment protections to certain parts of your database, if required. This also gives users more streamlined access to the database and to the data they need, when they need it.
Your database can also be secured by limiting visibility to third parties, such as joint-venture partners, who may only need to access certain projects in your software system.
Other security features, such as change tracking, are standard but highly necessary tools in geological databases. Change tracking shows a history of recorded edits. This makes reverting to a previous version of your data possible, if and when needed. Not only does this allow you to avoid unintended changes, but it helps identify where training may be required, or where a process is not working.
Geoscientific data management software for data integrity
Good quality geoscientific data software is an important part of maintaining data integrity and instilling trust in your mining operation.
acQuire’s GIM Suite software allows mining companies to formalise their data management processes. This ensures data quality through rigorous data processes and transparency, allowing you to easily manage your geoscientific data.
GIM Suite provides a single source of truth for your data so everyone in your organisation, from geologists through to mine management, can access the same information and be assured of its quality. It provides a secure way to manage your data across an entire enterprise.
If you want to ensure you’re maintaining the highest level of trust and data integrity in your operation, find out more about acQuire’s GIM Suite, the preferred software in the mining industry to ensure geological data integrity. Or contact us directly.
