Collections

A collection is basically a name that is given to a grouping of sites.

A collection can be based on:

• spatial relationships (boundaries)
• a set of shared attributes
• a combination of both

Some obvious examples immediately come to mind, such as tenements and prospects. However, a collection can literally be anything that could be used to identify a specific group of sites.

For example, one could have a collection that identifies all the drillholes that were included in a specific resource study or scientific survey; or a collection that is based simply on ownership, e.g. a company or joint venture.

The system also caters for the temporal aspects that are inherent in some of these relationships. For example, drillhole collections based on tenements must adapt to any changes in the tenement boundaries over time.

Each collection type can have a distinct set of user-defined attributes that are used to store metadata pertaining to a given collection instance. These metadata are implicitly inherited by all drillholes included in the collection.

The advantages of this approach range from improved database design to purely practical considerations when dealing with data storage and retrieval. Attributes that were traditionally stored in the drillhole header can now be stored elsewhere in normalised fashion, providing a more flexible approach to data management, data export and reporting.

Sites can be linked to collections in two ways:

• Dynamic or spatial links, that are determined programmatically by the system
• Static links, that are defined manually by the end user