The Australian agency responsible for collecting geoscientific data is making its vast collection open to the mining industry. Geoscience Australia (GA) manages masses of data generated by exploratory activities over the years. Processing and storage technology has caught up with the archive, meaning it's now possible for the mining companies to analyze the data stocks. It's a new form of prospecting, if you will.
This news prompts me to wonder where the uncharted stocks of the world's data riches might be. If the mining companies in Australia hadn't been obligated to send their geoscientific data to the government, would they have discarded it? I doubt it. They'd have stored it themselves. GA has done a good job as archivist but its greater value-add is as aggregator. The mining industry has an industry repository open to all members.
There must be countless other fields of activity where rich data deposits lie in corporate silos. Figuring out where this stuff is and how much of it is legitimately shareable are both considerable tasks. Agreeing standards for data formats would be almost trivial in comparison.
Maybe we will see a new type of entrepreneur arise: organizations that seek out data deposits and bring together communities of interest that can benefit from those resources. Data Miners
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