Saxon Druce

The winners of the Ore-X Challenge have been announced by Unearthed. We believe this is the first time an operational problem at a mine has been solved via an online competition.

GlassTerra was founded with a view that fundamentally reducing the effort and friction to view, access and exchange mining geospatial data would bring efficiency and innovation to the industry. The Gold Fields Ore-X Challenge has not only solved a mine’s operational problem but also gave us our first evidence that supports our view.

Congratulations to Brian Lynch, whose hard work and persistence produced the algorithm that won the $10,000 AUD first prize! Brian won out of a pool of over 270 contestants who signed up for the challenge, with over 100 submissions lodged from all over the world.

GlassTerra provided support for the competition by hosting an interactive 3D model of the source dataset.

The 3D model on GlassTerra allowed potential competitors to understand the context behind the competition, before deciding whether to enter. We had over 1,000 people from all over the world view the model in the first few weeks after the competition opened.

By the end of the competition, the top 3 placing algorithms were making predictions with the same accuracy as the site geologists. The Gold Fields team of geologists did the final judging and selected the winners based on the quality of their results.

Gold Fields Principal Resource Geologist Shaun Hackett was excited about the outcomes from the competition:

It was a thrilling process to present an operational problem from a Western Australian gold mine on a global platform and see the diversity of solutions that were put forward.

The geology team at the mine who deal with these problems on a day to day basis could immediately see how the winning entry can be put into use straight away to help them out.

Our Ore-X Challenge for Gold Fields was the world’s first crowd-sourced challenge to solve a day-to-day operational problem within the mining industry. The outcome of the challenge is software which can be deployed immediately into production use, with an immediate operational benefit. The Gold Fields mine benefited from the competition by lowering costs and improving safety.

Do you have an operational challenge at your mine which could benefit from opening it up to an innovative solution? If so get in contact with us to talk about how we could help.

Saxon

We’ve just released an update to GlassTerra which allows anyone to upload, view and share data files created with the GOCAD modelling software.

This is an example of some faults and geological surfaces loaded from .ts (triangulated surface or mesh) files:

We also support .vo (voxet or block model) data:

When combined with our cutting plane tool, it is possible to look inside a cross section of the voxet model as well:

The following is a .vs (vertex set or point cloud) dataset of earthquake locations around Indonesia coloured by depth, along with a .pl (line or polyline) dataset of nearby coastlines:

The .sg (stratigraphic grid) format is similar to a voxet or block model, but allows for irregular cells to follow the shape of the stratigraphy:

The .wl (well) format can be used to record drillhole paths:

We’ve also added support for .grs (gridded surface) files which contain 2D or 2.5D gridded data, as well as .gp (group) files which are used to group together multiple datasets of the other GOCAD formats.

Thanks to the Geological Surveys of Queensland and Victoria for the datasets used in the above screenshots.

Do you use GOCAD for your modelling? If so we invite you to go to our upload page, sign up for a free account and give GlassTerra a try. Your data is completely private until you choose to share it.

Our research has discovered that there are over 100 different geospatial file formats used within the mining industry. Our goal is to support all of them, to make it easy for you to share any geological model or mine plan with anyone, no matter what modelling platform you use. Our web-based viewer allows you to view your data right in your browser, without any extra software. Let us know which data formats you’d like us to work on next!

Saxon

GlassTerra has teamed up with global mining company Gold Fields and resources innovation group Unearthed to open a unique online innovation challenge for innovators around the globe.

The goal of the challenge is to develop an image processing algorithm which can accurately classify gold ore in an underground mine. The winner of the competition will receive $10,000. Could it be you?

GlassTerra is providing a preview of the source data for the competition, to give entrants the spatial background to help understand the data.

The competition is being run by Unearthed – check out portal.unearthed.solutions for full details. Registration for the challenge is open now. Submissions will open on the 25th of August and final submissions will close on the 25th of September at 11:59 (AWST).

Good luck!

Saxon

The Geological Survey of Queensland have just published on GlassTerra a model of the copper-gold mineral potential in the Quamby region in western Queensland Australia. The model shows areas which have a high chance of containing gold or copper deposits, and is approximately 90km by 80km and 2.5km deep.

We’ve made this our sample model on GlassTerra and it is available to view without login.

Matthew Greenwood from GSQ has also published twelve other models describing the various data sets used to build up the prospectivity model.

Visit GlassTerra and you’ll be able to view all of these models.

Saxon

The Austmine 2015 Conference was held in Brisbane, Australia on the 19th-20th of May.

Paul Lucey from Gold Fields presented on Gold Fields’ robotic vision technology, which produces full 3D scans with surface photos of their underground mines. Paul showed a demo of a small section of one of their models on the GlassTerra platform.

Paul has published this model publicly, so you can have a look at it on GlassTerra here!

Saxon

We’ve just launched the new version of our website!

Check out our sample model of the Quamby region in Queensland Australia, prepared by the Geological Survey of Queensland.

Saxon