In Australia, the reporting of mining results of public companies is governed by the Joint Ore Committee 2012 reporting code (JORC, 2012) which sets minimum standards for public reporting of results of exploration and mineral resource estimation. These public reports include an assessment of the quality and confidence in the data and work carried out to obtain an estimate of mineral resources (Coombes, 2008).The accumulated confidence from each component of the phases, expressed in either qualitative or quantitative terms, is often presented as a list of evidence to justify the classification of the mineral resource into differing levels of increasing geological confidence, namely Inferred, Indicated or Measured (Coombes, 2016). McCarthy (2014) found that the performance of Feasibility Studies in mining projects has been poor, with a 50% failure rate, with geological understanding, interpretation and estimation of the mineral resource directly contributing to 17% of the failure. These stages of the Feasibility Studies are underpinned by the interpretation of the spatial domain. There has been recent calls for improving the quality of public reporting by ensuring all risk is quantified for all components of Feasibility Studies (Nopp, 2016, Eidsvik and Ellefmo, 2013, Dominy et al., 2002, Silva and Boisvert, 2014, Glacken and Trueman, 2014) to allow public investors and industry professionals make better informed decisions, however, uncertainty for spatial domains is still rarely reported.
CITATION: McManus, S, Coombes, J, Horta, A and Rahman, A, 2019. A workflow for assessing interpretation uncertainty in spatial domains using Bayesian approximation, in Proceedings Future Mining 2019, pp 1418 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).