Drill Hole Data Interpretation and Data Capture

Recode historic drill logs into a consistent coding system

Background and Objectives

The client is a leading exploration company based in Australia and has executed several projects in North America and Australia. They work on a business model that combines technology with 3D Geosciences to increase the rate of discovery in sub-surface exploration.

Key Aspects of the Project

• The key objective of this project was to recode historic drill logs into a consistent coding system. The final recoded data after geological interpretations was required to be loaded into MS Access database after performing the specified validation and quality checks.
• Magnasoft provided these services to help clients achieve their end objective of identifying areas of prospective world-class deposits.

Services Rendered and Methodology

Magnasoft's team of experienced geology consultants and geotechnical engineers performed the following services:

• Drill Log Reports
  

  The drill hole logs for the project were provided in an electronic format (PDF & TIFF files); each drill log was supported by a report containing detailed information about the drilling methods, geology of the area (with maps), exploration statistics, core profiles, survey details, and other relevant data.

• Geological Interpretation and Recording of Logs
  

  The log report had information about lithology, alteration, mineralogy, veining, structures, geophysics, survey, and sample and assay data; each of these geological features formed the tables of a drill hole database.

  Based on the geological interpretation it was required to compile a geological database in order to perform further data analysis and modeling.

  To uniquely represent the rock type, structures and geological formation, a unique coding system was developed and compiled in the form of Look Up Tables (LUT); for example, a LUT table for "Alteration" feature contained a few hundred unique codes to represent alteration types.

• Data Capture
  

  With the completion of geological interpretation task by the team of geologists, the recorded values with observations were entered into spreadsheets (Microsoft excel) by a database team.

• Upload to MS Access Database
  

  The data captured in spreadsheets were exported using a data-loading tool, to a well defined and designed drill hole database in MS Access with relevant geological tables, relationships, primary keys and constraints.

• Validation Checks
  

  Validation tools with predefined rules for ensuring data integrity and data completeness were developed for individual tables in order to ensure that the data entered was free of errors like typos, mismatched LUT values, and overlapped intervals.

Tools used:

• Microsoft Access
• Microsoft Excel
• ACDSee