Louis Racic, Geosoft Product Management Director, reviews workflow improvements and new capabilities coming in the 2010 software release scheduled for early March.
What can we expect in Geosoft's 2010 software release?
There are three key themes that have guided our software development effort. They are: ease of use, improving data accessibility and advancing 3D subsurface capabilities. All three are aimed at improving your overall experience with Geosoft software, with an emphasis on making the existing capabilities more accessible and supporting your ability to explore data more effectively within an integrated environment.
When will the 2010 Software Release be available?
Our current plan is to ship the 2010 release in the first quarter, early March.
What is Geosoft doing to improve workflows within the software?
We've made a number of tasks more intuitive, and easier to complete, through improvements in workflow and removal of known bottlenecks to efficiency.
As an example, we've made it easier to make grids of all of your geochemical assay data by adding multiple channel gridding. We've also improved our array handling in databases and removed the limit for the length of map group names.
Dynamic linking of data points between maps and GDBs is a valued capability within Geosoft software and we've made it better by adding shadow cursor support for all data views within a map. A map with a section view and surface view will now be linked with a shadow cursor. This linking includes scatter plots and tri-plots, plan maps, section maps and 3D.
What improvements can we expect to see with respect to 3D?
Effective 3D rendering of the subsurface has become essential for presentation and collaboration, however a great deal of work is still completed on plans and sections. Moving naturally between 2D and 3D is critical, and making this transition more seamless, is a key focus.
With the 2010 release, we have added new support for crooked geophysical sections, in our Geophysics extension, to provide more accurate representations of the data in 2D and 3D. Geophysical sections are not always straight; some are bent, some are gently curving, and some are tortuously meandering. The ability to accurately represent crooked sections is a significant enhancement which can contribute to better interpretations.
Within our core platform, we continue to expand 3D gridding options and have added utilities to make working with voxels easier.
What is Geosoft's strategy with respect to data accessibility?
Geosoft continues to expand data access capabilities in order to address the challenges inherent in organizing, finding and accessing the increasing volumes of data used for earth exploration projects. This includes providing tools to easily find data, and expanding our data format support to promote efficient exploration and integration of diverse data types. We've built our data access solutions around our core Geosoft DAP server, and search technologies.
With the next software release, we have created a single data access tool, Seeker, to simplify data search and retrieval. Seeker combines the capabilities of our two existing 'Get data' options within one interface that supports the entire data access workflow - from structured metadata querying to viewing of results and data extraction to a user's desktop application.
We've also expanded our support of ODBC, JPEG 2000 and GOCAD voxet data files. Our ODBC support now includes a new filtering capability, for accessing drill hole databases or surface data without the requirement for SQL query knowledge.
What new functionality supports the work of explorers?
We've added capabilities that support generalists and specialists across all disciplines - geology, geophysics and geochemistry.
Statistical and reporting capabilities have been improved within our exploration geology workflow, Target. For example, reporting a length weighted mean is crucial when dealing with irregular sample lengths, which is typically found with all drill hole data, and we have added length weighted mean calculation to drill hole stats. We also made it easy to highlight, report and assess significant intersections in drilling projects. Whether creating summary reports on your projects or assessing a new drill project you have inherited.
We've made enhancements across our range of geophysical extensions. Updated section support is now available for crooked sections within montaj Geophysics. A new Gridfill Multistep algorithm option has been added to MAGMAP. We also added draped surface calculations within our GMSYS 3D gravity modelling extension.
Within our geochemistry workflow, we've added log options for boxplots and a new duplicate sample ID scheme.
Are there improvements in the ESRI extensions?
Legend and Geosoft map layer handling is much improved within our ESRI workflows.
Statistical and reporting capabilities have also been added to our ESRI exploration geology workflow, Target for ArcGIS. This includes the ability to report and assess significant intersections in drilling projects.
We've made significant enhancements to our Geochemistry for ArcGIS extension, addressing stability issues and making it more robust and complete. With the new release we've added numerous leveling and a wide range of new capabilities, including 3D topography draping, coloured histogram, multi-histogram and probability plots.
What is Geosoft's plan with respect to earth modeling?
We recently welcomed Dr. Robert Ellis to our R&D team, in the role of Senior Scientist, Earth Modelling, whose primary focus will be the development of geophysical inversion capabilities in support of resource exploration.
Converting geophysical data into 3D earth models has helped to further insight into the subsurface and reduce risk in exploration for minerals and oil and gas. Inversion techniques have progressively moved from university research labs to industry exploration environments, however they remain highly specialized and complex. We see great value in making inversion capabilities more accessible, within exploration teams, and an integrated part of the explorers' toolbox for exploring data.
These are early days. We have started by defining the requirements of an inversion solution. We will provide more information later this year.
Will Geosoft software support Microsoft Windows 7? What is Geosoft's direction with regards to 64-bit computing environments?
Yes, we will support Windows 7 with this next release. We currently support Windows XP, Windows Vista 32 and 64 bit, and now Windows 7, 32 and 64 bit. Our applications are 32 bit but they are supported on 64 bit operating systems. For enterprise solutions, we currently support Windows Server 2003 and have added Windows Server 2008 R2 support in our 2010 release.
Are there any new resources planned for this software release?
We are continuing to expand our online video library, and for this release we will be adding three new videos: an introduction to Seeker, an overview of crooked section support and a Quick Tour of new capabilities in the Geochemistry for ArcGIS extension. The videos will be available on our Geosoft Videos page as part of the software release in March.