ABSTRACT
The extraction of minerals from the earth involves resource evaluation, project design and production planning. This chapter investigates available solid modelling techniques and presents a prototype Geoscientific Resource Management System (GRMS) which incorporates the benefits of boundary representation and volumetric representation, using linear octree encoding. The conceptual model is the manifestation of a set of rules which defines the abstract representation of an entity. Different rules are required for different entities and, therefore, the choice of model is determined by the geometric properties of the objects. Constructive solid geometry is a commonly used solid modelling technique in computer aided design/manufacture because object creation can be achieved interactively with a simple modelling language. The boundary representation technique used in 3D-GRMS is simple in concept. An object is defined by bounding surfaces which are represented by a set of non-intersecting planar polygonal faces; the latter are, themselves, defined by the set of vertices, in each polygon, and their connectivity.
