Draft:Mira Geoscience

Mira Geoscience Ltd. is a privately owned Canadian company specializing in advanced geoscience solutions for the mining and mineral exploration industries. The company offers a range of services including advanced geological and geophysical modeling, 3D-GIS technology, integrated interpretation and visualization, open-source technology, 4D multi-disciplinary data management, and geotechnical hazard assessment.

Mira Geoscience provides both software solutions and consulting services. The company is headquartered in Montreal, with offices in Vancouver, Canada, and Brisbane and Perth, Australia. It also has remote employees working globally.

History
Mira Geoscience was founded in 1999 by John McGaughey, who holds a MSc in Geological Engineering and a PhD in Geophysics from Queen’s University. Before founding Mira Geoscience, John spent 10 years at the Noranda Technology Centre as a Senior Scientist in their rock mechanics group.

In 1999, John McGaughey and Marc Vallée introduced the 'Common Earth Model' (term originated in the Oil & Gas industry) to mining and mineral exploration through the application of integrated interpretation, which is defined as the interpretive process by which a ‘common earth model’, consistent with all data and geological reasoning, is created. This adaptation to mining was inspired by the common earth model (also known as shared earth model) work published by S. Garrett in 1996

In 2006, Mira Geoscience published 'The common earth model: A revolution in mineral exploration data integration'. The mining-specific workflows are still available through GOCAD Mining Suite, a customized software extension of Aspen-SKUATM, developed by Aspen Technology for the Oil & Gas industry. GOCAD Mining Suite was developed for the mining and mineral exploration industries, as a software tool for integrated multi-disciplinary 3D geological modelling that enables integrated interpretation of multi-disciplinary geoscience data, including geological, geophysical, geochemical, structural, and geotechnical data.

In 2015, Mira Geoscience first released Geoscience ANALYST, a free 3D visualization and communication software for integrated, multi-disciplinary geoscience and mining data and models. The software also includes 3 additional paid modules for extended functionality: Geoscience ANALYST Pro offers numerous processing, analysis, and planning tools; Geoscience ANALYST Pro Geophysics for advanced geophysical modelling and interpretation; and Geoscience ANALYST Pro Geology for additional geologist’s toolkit including AI methods.

Geoscience ANALYST also enables the integration to open-source and advanced geophysical inversion codes, such as VP Suite and SimPEG, using the software's interface and Python―through geoh5py, an open-source Python API, and the geoapps repository― allowing for custom scripting and automation to enhance the analytical capabilities of the software. Geoscience ANALYST can also be used as the software interface to UBC-GIF codes, which are developed by the University of British Columbia Geophysical Inversion Facility and sold separately.

In 2022, Mira Geoscience received funding from the Mining Innovation Commercialization Accelerator (MICA) to accelerate the development of '4D Data Integration for Mining' through their software application Geoscience INTEGRATOR, a data management system first released in 2014 that enables storing, 3D visualization, querying, analysis, and communication of mineral exploration and 4D geotechnical engineering data, models, and metadata.

In 2024, Mira Geoscience published 'A Framework for Mineral Geoscience Data and Model Portability' on GEOH5, an open format data structure that provides a documented, public, easy-to-use, vendor-neutral, and permanently accessible means of storing and disseminating models, data, and metadata. GEOH5 is based on open-source HDF5 technology. Mira Geoscience also developed geoh5py, the open-source Python API that can read from and write to the GEOH5 data structure, and Geoscience ANALYST, the free 3D viewer that displays the contents of GEOH5 files as tables, charts, documents, maps, cross-sections, and 3D visualizations.

Recognitions
In December 2017, Mira Geoscience received the Ultra Deep Mining Network's Outstanding Achievement in Commercialization Award for "a technical innovation and commercial sale that is quickly becoming the industry’s most comprehensive and advanced geotechnical data management and hazard computation system, Geoscience INTEGRATOR."

In March 2023, Mira Geoscience was awarded with the best extended abstract at ASEG 2023 for their technical paper on 'Integrated 3D modelling and associated machine learning targeting: the Jaguar Greenstone Belt example'. Mira Geoscience completed an integrated interpretation in the Jaguar Greenstone Belt (JGB), in Western Australia, on behalf of Round Oak Minerals (now Aeris Resources). The prospectivity analysis at Jaguar used a Machine Leaning approach, namely Random Forests, to generate a 3D Mineral Potential Index based on different combinations of input exploration vectors.

In January 2024, Mira Geoscience received the 2023 AME Innovation Award for "leading the development of an open-format data structure called GEOH5, an open-source documented, public, easy-to-use, vendor-neutral and permanently accessible means of storing and disseminating models, data, and metadata."