Re: Hello

[mrm@dme.nt.gov.au (Murray Maynard 61-8-899 95279)]

Hello from the Top End, where the temperature plummeted to about 16 degrees 
last night and beach walking under the full moon was quite a chore!

I work for the Department of Mines and Energy in Darwin, where I have 
responsibility for running the library and records management areas as 
well as providing geoscience reference and report management services. 

Last year I became involved with the Government Geologists Database Policy 
Advisory Committee (GGDPAC) and became especially interested in uniform 
reporting, across the nation, of mineral exploration activity. Since this 
activity is managed by a series of state and territory Mining Acts, we have 
the dilemma of everyone believing that uniform reporting is an appropriate 
goal (or Holy Grail?) but a difficult one to attain.

Earlier this year, the Chief Government Geologists Committee decided that 
"NT will prepare a standardisation proposal for digital exploration reporting 
and circulate a draft in a couple of months" and requested "each State/
Territory to provide NT ... with suggestions for a national digital reporting 
standard and with a contact in their organisations".

I have been asked to produce "a result" by the end of September, and am 
working on the dual tasks of (a) surveying all jurisdictions and trying to 
find common ground - or at least promote reporting convergence pending 
uniformity - and (b) exploring the feasibility of using SGML as the standard 
for "national digital reporting", and to begin the analysis which should 
preceed the development of a geoscience reporting document type definition.

If all goes well, the project may result in a rainbow-type flat file 
constrained wordprocessor DTD as its first manifestation. At a later date 
it may be possible to interface (I just love jargon) with the concurrent 
AMIRA P431 project for uniformity of geoscience database structures: but at 
present several pigs hovering outside my window are dimming that part of the 
vision.

In the best of all possible worlds, the one which perfects intelligible 
automatic cataolguing, the constrained DTD-conformant mineral exploration 
report could be filtered and its cataloguing data validated and dumped into 
state/territory geoscience databases and into the AMF's AESIS database.

Cheers,
Murray.


Murray Maynard
Chief Librarian
Department of Mines and Energy		Phone:	+61 8 8999 5279
GPO Box 2901				Fax:	+61 8 8981 7861
Darwin NT 0801				E-mail: mrm@dme.nt.gov.au