As one of the founders of DATAMINE in 1981, together with Peter Stokes, I was responsible for the design and development of the central database management and data handling functionality of the system, based partly upon my previous participation in development of the G-EXEC system in the British Geological Survey during the 1970s.

Incredibly, this central core of DATAMINE, including its file structure, remains virtually unchanged 28 years later, and 16 years after I left the company. Although this could be seen as a testament to the quality of the original design, an alternative explanation could be ossification of the design group within the company in the last 16 years - and their lack of understanding of the workings of their own software.

Since leaving DATAMINE in 1993, I have been doing many other things, mostly within the mining industry, which have included opportunities to carry out research with a longer time frame. This includes applications - in particular, new methods for modelling geology (including a very interesting and stimulating year working with CSIRO in Australia) - and also, more recently, work on the underlying data model and database theory.

For development of software to put some of these ideas into practice, I have naturally started from my own copyright source code, some of which was built into DATAMINE. The result is a set of demonstration programs (which I plan to make freely available), but at the same time a design philosophy which could, if the company were interested, offer the first major upgrade to the DATAMINE system since its original development - or could provide the basis for new 'open-source' development of geoscience and mining industry software.

Crucially, as far as the central database core is concerned, the new development would establish it as one of the first commercial relational DBMSs based on Codd's original concept of the "Open World Assumption", in contrast with all existing major commercial database systems. These all (at least) pay lip-service to the "Closed World Assumption" promoted by relational puritans such as Date, Darwen, and Pascal, but explicitly was not supported by the late Ted Codd, originator and developer of the relational database concept. For reasons why this is important, please refer to www.g-exec.com and to my various published and unpublished papers on this subject. In a nutshell, an open world database allows for incomplete and imperfect knowledge of the data, while a closed world database requires tables to be filled with data and has no place for any 'nulls' or unknown values. Commercial database built around the use of SQL do allow a null, but the SQL implementation is flawed and can lead to serious errors in complex databases.

This new web site will chart the progress of these developments and could form the focus for radical new software development in the minerals industry and beyond. The database ideas have been developed with specific applications in mind but are of very much wider potential use.

A series of applications will also be produced, fully integrated with the database.

For more information, please email me at