Alex Fuentes In this episode of the UNFC Podcast, our focus is on the data side of the United Nations Framework Classification for Resources. With the CRMA mandating the use of UNFC at the project level, there’s a growing need for all those involved in the UNFC ecosystem to have access to both a broad and deep suite of data, and where there are gaps in the data we have the opportunity of looking backwards to help us build the context needed for the future – whether it’s a project scale or regional level.

Matthew Grimshaw We’re delighted to be joined by Nicole Barlow, a Professional Geoscientist and founder of Purple Rock, based in British Columbia, Canada. Purple Rock works with unlocking overlooked legacy data, from mineral exploration projects to geological surveys across many Canadian provinces, territories and beyond. And we all talk about the importance of recycling, and secondary raw materials, both in terms of environmental impact and supply chains. So it’s great to have someone doing the equally important job of recycling old data and making it into something new and valuable.

Alex Fuentes Welcome to the podcast Nicole!

Nicole Barlow Great! Thanks for having me. I, as you mentioned, I’m founder and CEO of purple Rock. I started the company in 19 years ago. And we love to give old data, old geoscience data, new life. My background is geoscience. And I’ve always loved, English and documents and library science as well as as geology. And so being able to put them together is great. We take historical data and we give it new life. But that goes from everything from curating historical collections to determine what documents should be included in a database. But also scanning and Optical Character Recognition, metadata indexing, digitizing of tabular data out of historical scanned documents, and also using AI to pull out new sources of potential deposits and new insights into old information. We also have a GIS team that is great at, georeferencing historical maps with no other coordinates on them, and pulling out those points to give context to, actual values like assays and drill logs. So yeah.

Matthew Grimshaw That’s excellent. So how did you come about founding purple Rock? What was the genesis of it?

Nicole Barlow I was working as a student, an intern, basically with the British Columbia Geological Survey. And I had the, the honour of working with one of their Professional Geoscientists. And the first day of my first worked home with them, he sat me down and got me editing documents and editing papers that he had written. And so that’s kind of how I started with the technical editing and deciding to start my own company, because you can’t really join a geological editing firm in Canada there, they don’t exist. So and from that point, with my experience with the Geological Survey, I also got to work with their database team and, one of the first databases that we worked with, one of the first projects we had with Purple Rock was working with their property file database, and that was in its inception when I was a student. And so they brought me on after, after graduation as a contractor. And we started working with historical data right then. And since then, we have worked with, seven of the Geological Survey’s across Canada, processing similar projects. This is back 2006, 2007, when we started. So at that point, the technology was, basically scanning things to PDF because people wanted PDFs. But as technology has changed over time, Purple Rock has also adapted to to do that. So, going from just scanning and indexing PDFs to pulling, digitized data out of it. So taking tables and, making that data available in a standardized Excel format so you can actually query the data; and then getting into AI, applications and using AI to pull even more and more information and value out of that data, and looking at critical minerals now, because that’s what industry is, is focused on. So we’re adapting to to be a service for that purpose as well.

Matthew Grimshaw Yeah, I guess that was one of my follow up questions for that was so you said that was the start of the kind of geological surveys needing changes, I guess. How are you seeing that change? Like you said, more companies are wanting to do this. So you’re seeing that more commercialization of it, taking some of the learnings you’ve taken from that geological survey data into more private companies. Is that something that you’re you’re seeing a lot of demand for?

Nicole Barlow On occasion. I think that as geological surveys they’re often the repository of all of this geological data for a region. And so they often get given data or, at least in Canada, from our experience, they get given data from industry when industry doesn’t know what else to do with it. And so with all of these donations coming in and a small budget of a geological survey, they need help. They need the external help that Purple Rock can provide, instead of needing to do it themselves off the side of their desk. And so, industry works on a different timescale a lot of the time. So it’s not, not necessarily. Yeah. They want all of the data processed yesterday. And that’s difficult with historical data just because of all of the nuances and details and difficulties with the older documents, the scans of photocopies that have been photocopied three times after being faxed somewhere, it makes it difficult to process that data quickly. So you have a lot of AI systems who can easily take data off the internet and put it into a format that’s usable, stuff that’s been processed, say, since 2000, is often like born digital documents, is easy to put into an AI and get the data out, but it’s those difficult documents that take the time and take the expertise that we’ve developed over the last almost two decades.

Matthew Grimshaw Yeah, I guess that that was also the thing was like, what the what the challenges and how they’re changing as as technology and things are moving forward. Is there anything that you’ve learned during this journey from founding to now, how things could be done differently and how you see it changing into the future?

Nicole Barlow Oh something we noticed early on as we started working with historical data, is that especially the databases that we have, the data collections that we’ve looked at have been so disparate it’s very difficult to figure out what metadata to capture, what fields to put in a database when every single document is different. And like if you have a field notebook versus a, an assay sheet versus a report, and then you have a mylar overlay on an air photo and a map, how do you how do you harmonize the metadata that you want to capture for all of those things, so that it’s searchable in a standardized way? And so that required a lot of kind of manipulation of the fields so that they could be open ended enough to capture the data. But also standardized and structured enough that you can then search for that same data. So, it’s great to do that beginning part of your scanning things to PDF, but a PDF is still just an image. And so with technology over time, we’ve gone from, we’ve developed proprietary OCR software. We call GeoOCR that has that geoscience capability, the historical geoscience capability in it. So we’re as a geological dictionary and handwriting recognition, as well as standard OCR, still recapturing optical character recognition. We are capturing all of the text on a page in a PDF. So then that becomes searchable. And then from that point, using technology and using scripts that we’ve developed in-house, to recognize where the tables are in a document and pull things out in a standardized way and then convert that, because every assay lab has a different format. So you need to be able to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. And so pulling all of that out and putting it into a standardized format, same thing with drill logs that you’re looking for a standardized format so that you can actually query things. And that’s a step beyond, okay, where you’re going to search metadata, or you’re going to search the OCR. But with that OCR, then you can create a full text data repository of the historical data within these PDFs. And we’ve been running natural language processing on that data to query things beyond just a regular keyword search. But using semantic searching and harnessing the power of AI to actually find basically a needle in a haystack. So, using that data, using that natural language processing power to make the haystack smaller so it’s easier for the geologist to find the needle. So we’re not we’re not eliminating the need for the geologist to read the reports, but because we’re in the age of big data, the geologists cannot read 300,000 reports. But if we bring it down to 3000 reports and put three geologists on it, then it becomes more of a doable problem. So if you get rid of all of the chaff, all of the haystack that you don’t need, it makes it easier to find what you are looking for. So that’s really exciting because there is so much historical data out there.

Matthew Grimshaw Now that’s great. And, and also as, as a geologist who’s created a lot of this data quite often it is very subjective. It’s observational. It’s not always data in a table or an assay table. It’s stuff that can be extracted and pulled apart. And it’s great to know that any of that information is going to be used and interpreted by someone like yourself. So I kind of just want to move on to the kind of the topic of this podcast. So, Alex, I don’t know if you wanted to maybe ask a question a bit more of a question about, the topic of UNFC.

Alex Fuentes How did you end up being involved, in working in the UNFC ecosystem, the UNFC world and, how have you found that relating to your digitalization of historical legacy data then?

Nicole Barlow I think I think we started with, meeting Satarla at PDAC a few years ago. So, with our experience with digitizing historical data, and I think that was kind of near the beginning of the VECTOR project. And so, you guys had this the experience of working with UNFC and working with the lack of harmonized, digitized historical data. And so, you kind of brought that to, to me saying this might be an opportunity for people around to help. And so through that experience and through, going to a number of conferences in Europe and talking to people, it’s definitely something that we’ve seen is an issue. And it’s not just UNFC, it’s just historic historical data digitization in the first place. But getting into that UNFC space, it’s been very interesting because of the, the Critical Raw Materials Act in Europe and just what’s happening in Canada as well with, reconciliation with First Nations and indigenous peoples. Yeah. To see how all of that works together. So, we’ve actually been working with UNFC data, or data for UNFC, from Ireland and Northern Ireland and pulling out all of the publicly available data that could potentially be used for UNFC classification. And that’s been a really interesting process.

Matthew Grimshaw Yeah. And how have you found that differs from, you know, the geological kind of data, that you used to processing. Is it a big shift, and is there any of the real surprises that have come up?

Nicole Barlow There’s definitely a lot more sources for the data related to UNFC in the socio-environmental side of things. So, we had one staff member spend a week and a half to simply just looking for data for these two regions. So that’s been very, very different. A lot of the data has various source dates. It has -some of it is behind firewalls. Some of it is inaccessible because of file types. Some of it you can see on a map viewer, but it’s not downloadable. So it’s in all of these different formats as well, especially across to two jurisdictions, two international, the international boundary between them. So, they have different formats. So it needs to be harmonized. A bunch of it needs to be digitized. And it’s just for a mining company going out and looking for the data with UNFC it would be a big undertaking, especially if you’re dealing with multiple jurisdictions, not just Ireland and Northern Ireland, but say you have a, property in Latvia and another one in Spain and another one in Estonia. And like that would be a significant undertaking to capture all of the data that’s there. But it is there. It’s a lot of the public data. Data is available and it’s out there. It’s just not in the right format yet.

Alex Fuentes You mentioned something, just prior, which was the whole CRMA. Could you sort of expand upon it a bit? It’d be interesting to see your perspective as someone who isn’t in Europe, because I think the whole story often is so much wrapped up in Europe, but actually has a lot, a far wider reach and impact than just, just the EU because, you know, you don’t even need to be a Member State to, for example, have your project become Strategic. So it would be great to hear the Canadian perspective.

Nicole Barlow On the CRMA or, UNFC?

Alex Fuentes I guess UNFC and how it and what sort of similar systems are there, and is there anything similar in Canada? Do you think UNFC, can you see that being adopted in Canada?

Nicole Barlow Yeah. Well, UNFC isn’t currently being used in a widespread way across Canada. We do have our CRIRSCO system, which is called National Instrument 43-101. That has been around for about 20 years now and was last updated in 2011. But as of June, there’s actually been a an open, call for engagement with the public on this paper that was put out for a modernization of the 43-101. And that includes, including consultation with communities and First Nations groups, as well as the environmental and, the social aspect of things as well. So every technical document that I read, every technical report that I’ve read in Canada includes those things anyways. So with the importance of First Nations reconciliation in Canada, that has always been an aspect of exploration in Canada that you have to consult and you have to get buy in from the local people, whether it’s First Nations or other communities. And so that that’s kind of always been important. This, addition to the 43-101 process is kind of codifying what already exists and what’s already needed. Also in if you are to accept or if you are to put, if you are to do work on a claim, at least in British Columbia, you have to submit a notice of work to government. And that notice of work often involves, okay, well, what have you done to engage local communities? And what do you know about the environmental reporting that has been done in the area? And have you done any testing and stuff yourself? So, I think that that is it’s great that it’s becoming codified and it will make that bridging document between CRIRSCO and UNFC even easier, because previously there was that lack of the E Axis that brings that aspect into it. And so I think the great thing about UNFC is that it has everyone speaking the same language. So irrespective of the jurisdictional standards, in Canada or elsewhere in the world, if everyone can speak UNFC language, then everyone understands each other and it makes it possible for many companies and exploration companies to more likely, be able to work seamlessly in other jurisdictions. And it opens up new opportunities and brings people to different regions where they might have not previously been.

Matthew Grimshaw And I think that’s a really good that’s a really good observation. And like, we’ve seen, more recently, even the last few days, JORC have been going through this process as well about how to include this kind of, you know, some of these Modifying Factors is how they kind of term them. So and as you said, it’s often there, but it’s not really done. And it’s the headwinds that are clearly coming. So if we can be, you know, forward thinking then and ahead of the ahead of that curve, and I think that’s great to do. I think the, the observation about the UNFC and the CRMA, from our perspective, based in Europe is that, you know, UNFC has been around for a very long time, but no one has really adopted it or used it. And the fact that the EU has decided to adopt the, the UNFC as the overlying overarching framework that underpins everything in the CRMA. So all data has to align with UNFC and all Strategic Projects or projects that are part of that have to align with it. It’s made everyone kind of sit up and realize, “oh, hang on, we need to get our data, aligned, sorted and categorised”. And I think that’s why people are caring. You know, UNFC I think like you said, it has that overarching purpose. And that’s a that’s a real benefit and nuance of it. But I think we do need to differentiate and distinguish it from the CRIRSCO report because it does have a fundamental different kind of purpose. But I really liked your analogy drawing across it. I guess that’s into more of the question about the detail of it, of do you think it is possible for a geological surveys? So from Canada, where you have a much more mature data environment from the geological side of things, do you think it is possible to align completely with UNFC?

NNicole Barlow Yeah, I think so. Data is data. And so it just depends on how you use it and how you manipulate it and how you harmonize it with other jurisdictions. And for other purposes. And that’s one thing that sometimes geological surveys don’t realize is how people will be using their data. And so, when it comes to UNFC it’s, the geo surveys in Europe, I think are probably finding this now as people want their data for purposes that they may have not previously known about or planned for. And so that gives them an interesting challenge there.

Matthew Grimshaw Yeah, exactly. And is there anything, as you’ve been looking at the European data landscape, is there anything that really surprised you?

Nicole Barlow Well, in Canada, all of the geological surveys, all of the data is freely available to the public. And in Europe that’s not the case. And so that has definitely surprised me, with the Strategic Projects, with the alignment to UNFC, in my opinion, it’s probably more financially beneficial to a jurisdiction to make the data freely available to the public so that they can do these things and do these projects. And like Canada is globally renowned for their exploration and mining expertise. And I think it’s in no small part due to the fact that there is a plethora of historical data and geoscience data freely available to industry. So if you have a junior mining company that’s bootstrapped and is kind of running on a shoestring, and they can go to a geological survey and basically have an R&D department for their benefit. And so that’s really exciting for the junior mining companies. I know there’s over 900 junior mining companies in Vancouver, just across the water from us here in British Columbia, and they benefit from that public geoscience investment that, the geological surveys provide. And so I think the geological surveys in Europe would really benefit from, learning from that model in Canada. Just because like in Europe, you have even more data, you have an even longer mining history. And so there’s more treasures to be found buried deep in those file folders, and those boxes, and those PDFs. That would be really helpful to this push for critical minerals right now. And the Rearm Europe’s project and, all of the CRMA and everything that Europe is doing now, using historical data and making more public geoscience data available is going to advance projects more quickly, and it’s going to allow mining and exploration companies to be more targeted and use their resources to a better advantage than reinventing the wheel.

Alex Fuentes That’s great. And then one thing I felt with UNFC, I don’t know about you on this really good perspective to see is just making that data free and open, which is something I will support, but understand that there are limitations to that. But one thing I’m thinking is that with UNFC it’s not just the geological surveys you have to lean on – you have to get the data from other areas as well. Have you – what are your thoughts on that? Do you think, is ideally should there be a centralized data repository or is it really the geosurvey that needs to manage it all?

Nicole Barlow Oh, that’s a really good point. It’s because the data is everywhere. There should be a centralized portal that brings data in from all of the public data providers. So if you have an environmental organization or an environmental part of government that they need to manage their own data because it’s a different type of data, just like what I was saying with the historical data trying to bring it all into the same database, it has so many different metadata characteristics, it’s difficult to do, and it’s difficult to manage if you don’t know inherently what the data means. And so I think it’s important for, the data to be open, not with not just with the geological service, but with these other organizations who are managing the data. So I don’t know if the Geological Service for Europe that EuroGeoSurveys is planning might be one of these portals that can bring in data from multiple places. I know one of the geological surveys here in Canada has a map portal, and it brings in over 200 layers, not just from geological survey data but is bringing in, layers from an environment from water, from roads and satellite imagery as well, and overlaying it all on the same mapping interface. And so people can come in and toggle the layers on and off and find what they’re looking for, but it also allows them to go back to the original source data and investigate more fully there. It just has this mapping interface that shows everything, in a holistic way. And I think that’s the great thing about UNFC. It’s bringing – it’s looking at mining and exploration in a more holistic way. So not siloed from the rest of the from the rest of the communities and from the rest of society. It’s mining and exploration is part of it and needs to be considered in, in that framework. And so, yeah, I think that that’s great about UNFC but I think that the data needs to also show that, yeah.

Alex Fuentes I guess this is a topic that will come up repeatedly on the podcast, but, it’s sort of the whole intersection of UNFC and sustainability. How do you see this sort of developing into the future, and how do you think people like you in the private sector can help strengthen that relationship?

Nicole Barlow Yeah. I think that UNFC is a is a driver, like Matt you were saying about, that UNFC is a driver to capture more of that historical data and digitizing it and bringing it into the future. And I think that that really helps with sustainability. If you have historical data and it’s sitting in a warehouse somewhere, it’s not useful to anyone. But if you bring it into the modern digital world and you can use it to inform current exploration, you are not only saving money and saving time because you’re more likely to find things more quickly – it’s basically you’re not going into a region blind, so you actually kind of have a roadmap of what’s been done before. And that that helps. Yeah. Save money and save time. But it also helps decrease your environmental footprint that you’re not drilling the same thing 3 or 4 times like we’ve seen in some collections that you have the same drill holes again and again and again. And it’s like the first people didn’t realize what had been done before. They didn’t even look at the data. And so that helps with the environmental footprint, but also looking at things like the circular economy. And you’re taking not only the initial material out of a mine, but then you’re looking at the waste rock and tailings and you’re processing things differently. Another advantage to looking at historical data from a public company perspective is that now we have access to all of this technology that is new. That’s the biological mining with the organisms that can process copper and stuff – it is very exciting. You have carbon sequestration and capture, all of that wasn’t possible before. And so you have historical mines that might be able to be restarted because of these new processes. And that disturbed land is not just disturbed for one purpose. It’s then then still being used and still being sustainable. So it’s creating that circularity that we need.

Matthew Grimshaw Yeah, I think that’s great. Especially with the, you’ve already kind of touched on it, that kind of holistic, interconnected system that we’re trying to create – that is sustainability in my view, it’s that joining everything and actually finding those interconnections. And I think, I always try and remind people, you know, until you actually get the all out the ground and the minerals out of the ground, put it to a processing plant, your project is effectively held on the quality of your data. Basically you need to have good quality data because ultimately that’s the asset that you’re sat on. Yeah, I think that’s really good.

Nicole Barlow Exactly. The other the other thing about the historical data with UNFC is if you’re going into a region that has a historical mine, you can look at that mining history to get a good idea of the social impact of mining in that area. So it’s not just from for the quantitative data. It’s – you’re looking at, okay, well, was this a good experience for the community? Because those impacts are lasting and will give you a good jumping off point to do research for social impact today.

Matthew Grimshaw Yeah. Data with context is always way more valuable. Now I agree. Thank you, Nicole, for joining us for the podcast. I think we’ve got a really good overview of, a different perspective, a Canadian view on the data landscape and some of the challenges of the digitization, validation, and compilation of just data in general, not just related to the UNFC. So, yeah, I really appreciate your time. And Alex and I look forward to chatting to some more guests. Thank you very much!

Nicole Barlow Thanks for having me!

Matthew Grimshaw So that was a great episode there with Nicole. Alex, what did you think was some of the great findings that we, we kind of unlocked from Nicole having chat to her? What are some of the main insights that you think we got?

Alex Fuentes Honestly, to me, I think the big thing that she got across was the importance of just making sure the data is out there, it’s accessible, it’s free and just sort of the – what it will unlock for everyone working in the raw material sector.

Matthew Grimshaw Yeah. And for me as well, it was that kind of the difference in availability of data. So just the assumption that all data is free in Europe and that just isn’t the case. And you’d think we’re one united block. And you can see how in Canada where the guys at Purple Rock have spent most of their time using and digitizing consistent data. And you can that’s clearly reflected in how much value the industry has provided that we’ve got an active and thriving mental exploration and mining industry. So I think UNFC is one way to maybe help companies and countries, a geological surveys collect and get their ducks in a row. But, it’s certainly not a simple task as it is in other places. Is there anything that you think are the main barriers that I think Nicole is going to face going forward? If she’s trying to apply this in Europe?

Alex Fuentes Well, I think in Europe there’ll be some issues. I think a lot of it is going to be dealing with some very old data, not necessarily aligned to CRIRSCO codes or even sort of naturally old Russian ones, for example. So there’s going to be a huge amount of different data formats. Not all of it will be in anything close to your UNFC or CRIRSCO, and I think bringing that together will be the biggest challenge there.

Matthew Grimshaw You know, I think it’s going to be huge. So we look forward to hearing in the next episode from someone who’s actually actively involved in helping companies apply for strategic projects. So a slightly different, more applicable take. Look forward to you all joining us there. Thanks.

Alex Fuentes The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests or contributors on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the hosts, Satarla, and Critical Productions. Any statements made should not be interpreted as endorsements or official positions. Listener discretion is advised.