Data Mining and Competitive Exploration land acquisition in 2015

Using the new Historical Data Service on MTO, LandTrack Systems has made it easy for explorers to access up to date tenure data without overloading the DMP’s online systems, at a fraction of the cost.

BACKGROUND: From February 2015, “Data Mining” on Mineral Titles Online (MTO) was banned by the Department of Mines and Petroleum (DMP), with accounts being suspended of companies suspected of using data mining tools. This was in response to concerns raised in December 2014 at a DMP training session in Kalgoorlie, where prospectors complained of big companies having unfair advantages when acquiring new ground by using “data mining” tools on MTO.

This ban was of great concern to many tenement managers who had become accustomed to using bulk tenement data in their day to day compliance tasks. Screen scraping tools such as “Mineral Titles Audit” by LandTrack Systems (www.landtrack.com.au ) which downloaded, analysed and reported across hundreds of tenements at a time could no longer be used, forcing users to return to copying and pasting data laboriously from MTO tenement by tenement, taking hours to prepare reports that used to take minutes.

RESPONSE: In response to industry feedback, including a petition requesting access to historical data organised by LandTrack Systems, the DMP agreed to provide two new services: 1. A 4:30pm freely available RSS feed indicating ‘dealings of interest’ lodged during the day; and 2. A free overnight historical data service, in the same form as the existing paid XML extract. The data service came online in April, and the RSS feed in June.

Using these two services, LandTrack Systems now offers a range of cost effective tools to both monitor for ground becoming available in WA (GeoSearch) and download and analyse bulk tenure data (MTAudit). Both of these tools use a web based cache to only download the MTO data once, freeing up the DMP’s servers from needing to service thousands of separate requests each day for the same data. In this way, the DMP has been spared system upgrades, while the industry benefits from cheap access to tenure data.

SAVINGS: Rachel Burnett of LandTrack Systems said “Using the MTO paid data service for compliance purposes would cost a typical tenement manager around $1200 per month. Our tools cost around $175 per month, and give you sophisticated compliance tracking and many other reports with just a few mouse clicks. Similarly, you can now get alerts of ground becoming available in your area of interest from just a few dollars per day. In this period of major cutbacks across the industry, these represent major savings and productivity gains, as a result of these DMP initiatives.”