MaGISter-mine: A 2D and 3D web application in the service of mining industry

Abstract

In the course of mining activities, large amounts of data are collected by multiple scientific disciplines. Software to assist mining engineers in planning and decision-making is, however, absent; the software used in the mining industry is not capable of a holistic approach, and therefore does not function as a data integration interface. What is required to fill this gap/to resolve this issue is an application that is platform-independent, integrates multiple types of data and does not require GIS knowledge.In this paper, a webGIS application, MaGISter-mine, is presented that can solve the problems arising during mining activities. MaGISter-mine was created as a data integrating surface that makes querying and measuring geographical data easy. The MaGISter-mine application is able to handle photogrammetry models and laser-scanned point clouds, while distance, area and volume can also be easily calculated. The software can draw 2D profiles from 3D files. Time- and space-dependent changes between two surveys can be analysed, too. Geological strata can be edited, and new surfaces can be generated by kriging interpolation.During the development of the webGIS application, mostly open-source software and libraries were used. The spatial database consists of the PostgreSQL relational database management system and its extension, called PostGIS. To perfect accessibility on the client side, GeoServer with Apache Tomcat and Apache webserver were employed. The webGIS application was developed using OpenLayers, three.js and Potree, written in PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript languages.

Keywords

• Geoinformatics
• Mining design
• Spatial database
• OpenLayers
• Potree
• webGIS