A modern, reliable management of existing geological and mining data is a large asset for a nation to better understand existing assets, recognize future mineral potentials, and attract interest of the extractive industry and/or as base for mine monitoring. The GDMIS project, funded by the Worldbank, established such a management and geographic information system for the Geological Survey Department (GSD) as the main beneficary. GDMIS bases on a web-technology, allowing the concurrent administration and evaluation of non-public (intranet) data and the promotion of public (internet) data to attract possible investors of the extractive industry. The opening of the website will be in the new future – after clearance of copyright issues.
GSD has at the moment approximately 2 Terabyte of digital geodata and scanned documents, originating from colonial times and several geosurveying campaigns. Additional data, with approximate the same volume will be added in new future stemming from actually running geosurveys. The new system is the main tool to archive, manage, evaluate, cross-relate all these information. In particular the geographic information system component of the system allows the combined spatial and attribute querying. This is of major importance in the recognition of possible future prospect potentials to attract further interest of the extractive industry.
After a thorough analysis of the technical, data and human resource requirements, the project developed a prototype and started together with client’s staff the data and metadata acquisition for the system. Today the GDMIS achieves to store, load, edit, retrieve, visualize, analyse and detect correlations between the data and metadata from all relevant sources and thematic sectors like mining cadastre, topography, environment, geophysics, geology, prospecting, geochemistry etc. The consultant and the client’s technical staff established together – on basis of the actual needs and requirements of the Geological Survey in Malawi – dedicated and standardized workflows to continue the integration of the existing and future analogue and digital data.
Aside the development and implementation of the GDMIS, technical capacity training for data capturing, as well as user and administrator training accompanied the project.
GAF, a German technical consultancy (www.gaf.de), used its modular and scalable software GeMinIS (Geological and Mineral Information System, https://www.gaf.de/content/geminis) to realize this project. GAF AG proved again its capacities in the technical consulting of complex spatial data project for clients all over the world.
The photo shows the team of the Geological Survey Department.