Global Mining Guidelines Group (GMG) says 2019 has, so far, been a productive for its Open Mining Format (OMF) and the growing community that surrounds it.

GMG’s Data Exchange for Mine Software sub-committee is committed to making OMF implementation straightforward. To this end, it has developed a support document that, as Project Lead Sam Bain, Partner Integration Manager at Seequent describes, “provides easy-to-follow instructions for making the most of OMF in your chosen product”.

The document illustrates how to use OMF with Deswik, Seequent, and Dassault Systemes products currently supporting it, according to GMG.

Bain explained: “OMF is a straightforward format that is easy to implement…The format can be used to transfer points, lines, meshes and regular block models, as well as the metadata on these objects.”

Gustavo Pilger, Technology Research and Development Director at Dassault Systemes, said the document “shows the community that the file format exchange is real as it is already implemented across a few applications”.

Pilger hopes the document will help improve the format and frame its second iteration, while spreading “the word that there is a file format exchange that supports interoperability across applications”.

The community adopting the OMF is widening, according to GMG. Bane Sullivan, a graduate student at the Colorado School of Mines, created an open source viewer for OMF on GitHub, which, GMG says, offers a way to view an OMF file without having to buy a software package.

Seequent’s Bain said: “It is a great sign of a community developing around the OMF. It can only be a good thing if a format can easily be incorporated in a free viewer by a student working on their own.”

The sub-committee will also be kicking off OMF 2.0 at a workshop in Toronto, Canada, on February 28-March 1. OMF 2.0 will focus on block models, chosen in response to feedback from end users. Bain said: “The end goal of the workshop is to agree on what OMF 2.0 will look like and then share this plan with the wider community for review and comment.”

GMG’s Open Mining Format is an open-source file interchange format developed to enable seamless and reliable transfer of data between mine software packages, which can produce major efficiency gains by eliminating the time required for manual and convoluted data transfer across the mine site, according to GMG.