Weight of evidence method based on grid GIS and its applications on evaluation of mineral resources

Energy shortage brings the challenge of "high-efficiency, high-quality" to evaluation of mineral resources. Subject to conditions, general softwares for evaluation of mineral resources are mainly used in the stand-alone environment, while geological spatial data are often cross-regional, cross-platform and stored distributed. With the rapid development of grid computing, various distributed resources are able to be interconnected and merged into a “super-computer”. To realize rapid evaluation of mineral resources under the network environment, we apply grid computing to evaluation of mineral resources, building mineral resources evaluation platform in the grid computing environment. The architecture and method of weight-of-evidence evaluation of mineral resources under grid computing environment are proposed in this paper, based on the theoretical study of basic principles of weight-of-evidence and grid computing features. Meanwhile, an application on evaluation of copper mineral resources in the Yangtze River metallogenic belt is discussed. A small-scale grid computing environment is set up and upon the platform distributed spatial analysis is able to be executed according to the process of weight of evidence evaluation of mineral resources to obtain evaluation results. The results prove that our proposed method of mineral potential evaluation in grid environment can not only significantly shorten the calculation time, but also improve the evaluation quality.