Our Spatial Planet

A big thank you to the organisers, delegates and exhibitors of the Mining South Australia conference who helped make Apogee’s experience at the conference more than enjoyable. While not the perfect building or layout design for a conference, the success can be measured by the response from the people who visited our booth, People were very enthusiastic about the applications for DEMs and Aerial Imagery to support their Mining Exploration project.

As key resources for Mining Explorations, Apogee exhibited a range of Digital Elevations Models. IFSAR DEMs at resolution of 5m xy posting with 50cm Z accuracy over part of South Australia, PRISM DEMs at resolution of 7.5m xy posting with 3m Z accuracy, and Aerial Imagery at resolution down to 5cm. We also demonstrated the pronounced difference between SRTM(Global DEM at 90m xy posting, 15m Z) data that is freely available.
Our 3D visualisation system NEXTIMAGE was also of interest as people could have a play and check how user-friendly and easy it is to visualise and interact with any geospatial data.

The large scale PRISM DEMs along side the dune removal technique were of particular interest to several Mining Exploration companies with interests in western and northern South Australia.

We look forward seeing the people we met again and meeting all the new people at Ausmine 2009.

According to the Scope for Improvement 2008 report from Blake Dawson, an Australian legal service and strategic business provider, released November 2008, 52% of majors infrastructure projects in 2008 were not adequately planned. A significant increase from the 42% recorded just 2 years earlier, in 2006. Even more worrying, the lack of proper scoping resulted in more than a quarter of 1$bilion+ projects having cost over-runs of more than $200 million! And we are not surprised…

In the first stage of any infrastructure project planning, surveying the terrain is one of the most important steps in order to have an accurate spatial representation of the area. The larger the project, the more critical accurate spatial data is and a significant percentage of planning time, budget and personnel should be allocated to data collection.  The Report lists three of the “Main Factors” leading to poor scoping as “Lack of experienced personnel”, “Insufficient time” and “Insufficient site information”.

This is where the appropriate use of geospatial data from aerial or satellite sensors could provide the required information. Unfortunately it is at this very important step that the biggest mistake is usually made. Because of lack of time and experienced personnel, the planning of many multi-million or even billion dollar projects are based on inadequate geospatial data in terms of resolution or accuracy, resulting in increased costs and budget over-runs. The problem maybe due to a lack of understanding or appreciation of the importance of geospatial data in providing a solid project foundation. As an example, a project may require 1m contours and in view of inadequate planning for the associated data cost, a decision is made by management to derive the contours from freely available SRTM data. Technically this is not a problem, however deriving such apparent high accuracy from the 15-20 metre vertical accuracy of SRTM at a 90m posting is not sensible. While this sounds far-fetched, this example is based on an actual project and similar extrapolation of data without due care as to the warranted level of precision is a common occurrence.