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Database design |
Mallender Hall Ltd, 12 Glenfield Road, London W13 9JZ, UK
The management of exploration data concerns all the things that happen to a piece of exploration data during its life, and the management of the physical data is controlled by the information used to describe it. A description of the data forms part of a contract between a company and a recording contractor before the physical data even come into existence. Descriptive information about each data item and each dataset is recorded and re-recorded on many transmittals as the physical data move from recording contractor, to processing contractor, to storage contractor. The ‘computerized catalogue’ listing, which a storage contractor provides to an exploration company is often the only record of what is available, and the legal ownership records of these data are often stored elsewhere. The amount of this reference information used to describe exploration data (for example, the name and extent of a map or a line, the title of a report, the reference number of a tape) varies significantly from one data type to another, and the amount actually recorded often varies from one record to the next. Historically, there has been a lack of consistency throughout the industry in the terms used, and the number of those terms employed when describing and referring to exploration data. This poses problems in the management of exploration data.
The main problem concerns the storage, retrieval and transmission of this descriptive information; the information is rarely ‘processed’ as such. From a database point of view, the problem is to store large quantities of quite disparate and unstructured information, to find rapidly what has been stored, and to retrieve the information easily in a (re-)usable form.
Text databases are ideal in these circumstances: they can hold completely unstructured information, and allow users to find records using any data that appear anywhere in the content of the record. Accompanying software is used to provide a user interface to the text database, and this enables sophisticated systems which are very user-friendly to be developed easily.
