The NSW Department of Industry is the lead economic development agency in New South Wales, with over 6000 employees. The department is responsible for driving sustainable economic growth across the state. They achieve results by collaborating with and supporting businesses, industries and communities to advance investment, trade, innovation, productivity and regional growth across all sectors.
In line with the strategic goal for NSW to be the favoured state for mineral and resources exploration and mining investments, the Minerals and Resource Division for The Department of Industry sought a world-class storage and search vehicle for mining and exploration companies. With over 3.5 million pages of geolocated information, generated over the last 100 years, it was only available through an ageing facility with limited metadata search. It meant hard work for any mining organisation looking for specific data relating to their field, and potentially slowing investment into the State of NSW.
Parashift developed an integrated platform using Alfresco as the content store, Apache Solr for indexing and search and Tesseract to digitise the older paper- based reports and maps through Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The solution provides mining organisations and geology enthusiasts the benefit of being able to locate their data through broad search capabilities coupled with an amazing increase in speed and accuracy to better the overall efficiency of the organisations documents.