Namibia looks back over a history of more than one hundred years of mineral investigation and geological research. Mining companies and the government spent billions of dollars on geo¬logical investigations carried out in the country. The results of these are contained in thousands of files, maps and reports housed by the Geological Survey of Namibia (GSN) archive in Windhoek. Previously the public and GSN staff had access to these unique and mostly irreplaceable documents, but deterioration of the partly very old material made its conversion into digital format desirable. GSN is currently busy scanning this archival information and make it accessible through the Earth Data Namibia database.

The Earth Data Namibia project started in 2001, with scientists of the Economic and Regional Geology Divisions, in cooperation BEAK Consultants of Freiberg/Germany, designing the database. Funding for this project was obtained from the Minerals Development Fund as well as the government. Earth Data Namibia is a customized software, managing geological and related data held by the Geological Survey of Namibia. It is designed as a client-server-solution within the local area network of the GSN, both for internal use and as a tool to disseminate open-file mineral exploration data and other geological data to the public. At present Earth Data Namibia contains spatial and factual data on mineral deposits and occurrences, exploration and mining licences, drilling, geochemistry, geological reports, maps and other printed material, as well as related topographic and topocadastral information (e.g. farms, roads), together with metadata about scanned archival documents. To store and manage this factual, geometrical and unstructured information the data base uses ORACLE and ARCVIEW as platforms. User-generated maps (showing for instance geochemical data on a regional geology backdrop) can be printed out as hardcopies or saved as printfiles through an automated map layout facility. ARCVIEW Earth Data Namibia forms part of the GSN’s strategy to standardize the process of data collection and facilitate easy accessibility and recovery of information related to the natural resources of the country.