NGIS was contracted to provide technical expertise on the development of a GIS to assist Ivanhoe in managing the vast amounts of spatial data collected as the project (now in its exploration and mine-planning phases) looks to move on to construction, and then into production in 2007.

The Oyu Tolgoi exploration site is located in the south Gobi region of Mongolia, only 80km north of the Chinese-Mongolian border. A critical consideration in developing the GIS was overcoming the remoteness of the site and making the collated data securely available, to Ivanhoe staff around the world, for analysis and reporting.

To resolve these issues, NGIS packaged the following software applications:

• GeoSamba(e) - a web-based interface providing secure access to GIS data from any web-enabled machine within the Ivanhoe network
• MAADGIS - an extension to the existing MapInfo desktop GIS packages that provides the tools to easily search and access GIS data and associated documents.