Developing a Geological Management Information System: National Important Mining Zone Database

Geo-data is a foundation for the prediction and assessment of ore resources, so managing and making full use of those data, including geography database, geology database, mineral deposits database, aeromagnetics database, gravity database, geochemistry database and remote sensing database, is very significant. We developed national important mining zone database (NIMZDB) to manage 14 national important mining zone databases to support a new round prediction of ore deposit. We found that attention should be paid to the following issues: data accuracy: integrity, logic consistency, attribute, spatial and time accuracy; management of both attribute and spatial data in the same system; transforming data between MapGIS and ArcGIS; data sharing and security; data searches that can query both attribute and spatial data. Accuracy of input data is guaranteed and the search, analysis and translation of data between MapGIS and ArcGIS has been made convenient via the development of a checking data module and a managing data module based on MapGIS and ArcGIS. Using ArcSDE, we based data sharing on a client/server system, and attribute and spatial data are also managed in the same system.