Scientists and Sticky Notes
My useful analogy for XML data, and how it breaks.
I worked at CSIRO, Australia’s largest scientific establishment, for a few years, in the Predictive Mineral Discovery CRC. It was the most humbling time of my life, for someone used to being one of the smarter people in the room. They were trying to use modeling to drastically reduce the amount of expensive drilling required to forcast where good mineral deposits, such as gold, might be.
Mineral mining and exploration is a field full of very pragmatic scientists, engineers and project managers. They are usually focused on achieving results rather than conforming to computer science or software engineering niceties. These are the kind of people who find the limits in Excel or Microsoft Access, the hard way, just for their individual calculations.
“Mineral exploration and mining” basically means anything that’s not oil or gas. A vital part of the exploration phase is not just finding stuff but having a good idea of its quality and quantity. Someone needs enough information to decide if it’s worth spending many $millions digging it up and refining.
The data is incredibly complex. Scientific data tends to be across far more dimensions than operational business data. I had to find ways to teach people how to work with complex models. At one…
