Interoperability: Smart Refresh improves data quality

Interoperability is taking the mining industry by storm. Or that’s what you might think if you’ve attended a mining conference recently. We’ve been on the interoperability bandwagon for over 20 years at acQuire, cheekily describing our efforts as ‘playing well with others’. What you might not have heard about is our Smart Refresh feature. Here’s what you need to know.

The risk of outdated data

Working with outdated data presents a considerable risk to business, but it’s not a simple proposition to remedy. Maintaining a geological model, statistical simulation, or the like requires constant refreshing of the underlying original observations to keep them current.  If a dataset is one month old, you probably consider it to be up to date and use it to make business decisions and resource calculations. But are you certain there haven’t been any additional drillholes and logging or analytical results loaded since your last update? Would you know if field geologists made corrections to the data? Corrections could comprise updates, deletes and new inclusions. Could these changes impact the accuracy of your model or simulation?

More importantly, can you trust your geoscientific data to make business-critical decisions?

The only way you’ll know is if you load these changes and then compare the two datasets.  Only by reloading data can you rest easy that your model/simulation is based on the absolute latest-available and most up-to-date data. But in the process of reloading you can easily wipe out changes you made. That means you have to keep detailed records of the changes you made, as well. This can quickly become a time-consuming exercise and it’s easy to inject errors in the process.

We wanted to take the complexity out of it while ensuring a higher quality of data. Smart Refresh provides a surprisingly quick and easy way to incorporate changes and additions to your geoscientific data.

What is Smart Refresh anyway?

Smart Refresh gives people a quick and simple way to ensure they’re working with the most current data available. This feature is provided via an API called acQuireDirect.

At a fundamental level, interoperability allows “connectedness” between solutions, systems, machines and sensors. Because our software is used by organisations to manage their business-critical data, it’s natural for us to provide interoperability capabilities to other expert software systems in the exploration and mine planning space. That’s why we developed the acQuireDirect API.

How Smart Refresh works

First, Smart Refresh checks to see if drillholes or point samples have been updated in GIM Suite since the last time a dataset was extracted. Then it refreshes any changed data.

Not only does this mean you are working with the latest information, it saves you time and stress by only updating changed data – not reloading the entire dataset. Smart, eh?  That’s why we call it “Smart Refresh”

Which technology partners currently use Smart Refresh?

As of writing this article the following companies incorporate Smart Refresh in their products:

If you’d like to see Smart Refresh available in other software packages, make sure you let us and your software vendor know.

Why we focus on connected systems

Integrity is a driving force for our company, our people and our products. That motivates us to work closely with our technology partners to provide more value for each of our customers and the broader resources community.  We believe a long-term connectivity strategy with other technology vendors provides an ideal environment for effective decision-making. While it’s a current buzzword at conferences, it’s something we’ve been living and breathing for a long time.

If you have any questions about how you can introduce Smart Refresh or interoperability throughout your organisation, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.