DEVELOPING A MODERN SYSTEM TO ANALYZE WEST VIRGINIA COAL QUALITY DATA

West Virginia has a large collection of coal quality data commensurate with its status as a major coal producing state since the Civil War. Problems arise however due to the complex nature of the data in terms of sampling strategy, location precision, and data density. Most recently, due to concerns over issues that arise from the Mineral Lands Mapping Program, there are legal penalties for disclosing confidential data.

It is easy to see why blanket requests for data are not possible. At the same time we have an obligation to provide subsets of the data.

In the past SAS software was used to produce data listings and summary statistics from tabular data for data requests and internal applications, but licensing the software became difficult due to state purchasing rules. Also requests for maps, georeferenced data sets, and Excel worksheets are increasing.

Initially it was decided to develop a new database utilizing Microsoft Access with plans to eventually migrate to Oracle. This provides the capability to produce data listings and the summary statistics built into SQL, but this did not satisfy our needs for flexibility in producing one-time listings, sophisticated summary statistics, and GIS data.

The answer involves utilizing an obscure feature of Excel to query SQL databases and Windows features to transfer data from Excel to Geographical Information System Software.

Details will be discussed along with some, relatively simple results produced for the Mineral Lands Mapping Program.