Global Mining Guidelines Group Releases Beta Open Mining Format Version 2
Published: July 23,2024New version of interoperability standard embraces cutting-edge technologies
Global Mining Guidelines Group (GMG) is proud to announce the beta release of Version 2 of the Open Mining Format (OMF) is now available. OMF 2.0 showcases how modern technologies can be adopted to enhance the security, performance and maintainability of mining technology systems.
OMF defines an open standard to support data interchange between software used across mining operations. Implementing OMF within operations can put mining companies at ease, knowing their valuable data will remain accurate as it is passed through different software platforms.
The main functional enhancement of OMF V2 is the extension of the format to include all of the common sub-block model types used in mining. Transfer of block models between existing software packages is still one of the major barriers to interoperability. Use of OMF V2 will reduce issues of data integrity during transfer and the limitations of .csv files. All relevant data can be transferred as a single file.
One of the most significant advancements in OMF V2 is its implementation in the Rust programming language. Rust is renowned for its focus on safety and performance, and by utilizing Rust, OMF V2 benefits from its memory safety guarantees, eliminating entire classes of memory-related vulnerabilities and bugs that can lead to crashes, data corruption, and security breaches.
The adoption of Rust demonstrates how the mining industry can leverage modern software development paradigms to deliver robust systems, promoting best practices and mitigating IT security risks in mining operations.
Future Plans: Expanding Scope and Architectural Enhancements
OMF V2 is part of an ongoing journey toward a comprehensive and future-proof standard for mining data representation and exchange. Through collaboration between industry and the open-source community, GMG will work diligently to evolve and enhance OMF, keeping pace with the ever-changing demands of the mining industry.
Future plans include the addition of new data models for the standardized representation of diverse mining data such as plant operations, environmental metrics and equipment telemetry. GMG recognizes the importance of continuous architectural improvements to maintain the robustness, scalability, and performance of the OMF standard, and plans to explore advanced techniques and patterns for data serialization, concurrency and distributed processing.
These enhancements will enable OMF to handle large-scale mining data efficiently, facilitating real-time analysis, decision-making and collaboration across global mining operations.
GMG is also committed to collaborating with other organizations developing interoperability standards and platforms for mining, to ensure alignment. There is a great advantage to bringing the various developments together toward solutions integration.
Additionally, GMG remains committed to fostering an active and inclusive open-source community around OMF. By encouraging contributions from mining professionals, researchers, and developers worldwide, GMG aims to accelerate innovation, identify and address emerging use cases, and ensure the long-term sustainability and evolution of OMF.
Ongoing Collaboration and Feedback
Consistent with GMG’s commitment to open standards, the OMF V2 release has been developed through an open and collaborative process. The first implementation of OMF V2 in Rust format is available as an open-source project, allowing mining professionals, researchers, and developers worldwide to contribute, review, and provide feedback, fostering continuous improvement and innovation. Feedback is encouraged and should be made by creating issues in the GitHub repository or adding to existing issues.
The release of OMF V2 marks a significant milestone for GMG and the mining industry. By embracing cutting-edge technologies such as Rust, GMG demonstrates its dedication to delivering safe, efficient, and future-proof standards that drive innovation and promote best practices in the mining sector.
For more information about the OMF project and to access the open-source Rust implementation, visit https://github.com/gmggroup .
Technical Details
- Better documentation of the file format. No need to reverse-engineer it from the code and it’s more obvious what it can store.
- Smaller file sizes
- All parts of the file are now compressed, which was not the case with OMF1.
- Floating-point numbers can now be stored in single precision where higher precision is not required, saving space.
- Improved performance, with the Rust code using less time and less memory to read or write files when compared to the Python code.
- Block models
- Sub-blocks are now supported.
- Sub-blocks may use a gridded layout (including octree) or free form positions within the parent block.
- Attributes can be on parent blocks or sub-blocks.
- Improved attribution
- Boolean attributes are supported everywhere.
- Category attributes can have their own attributes so users can assign name and colour, but also density and other values to rock types, for example.
- Explicit null values for all attributes. No more special numbers.
- Composite elements allow exchanging complex data structures
- Objects can be arranged into nested groups.
- Attribution on the composite can assign values to each element.
- Makes it easier to exchange complex structured data and to put multiple structures into one file without causing confusion.
- With OMF1 a file could contain several dozen surfaces, but it wasn’t obvious what they represented. With OMF2, those surfaces might be grouped into two Leapfrog geological models plus a topography, for example.
- Improved textures
- UV-mapped texture images on surfaces.
- JPEG image support for textures.
- Includes code to convert OMF1 files to OMF2