Document understanding
OCR and multimodal language models that read typewritten and handwritten 20th-century logs — including tables that run across page breaks. Every extracted value keeps a link to the page it came from.
Software · AI · Geodata
The rock produced data for centuries. We taught a machine to read it.
Now the machine is teaching us what it means.
BitBlocks 01 AB builds systems that turn scanned drill logs, mine plans and assay lists into structured, searchable, visualisable data — and 3D views you can actually walk down into.
What we build
What we build
We work where document understanding, geodata and 3D meet — a niche too narrow for the big platforms and too hard for a spreadsheet.
Data engineering & search
Python pipelines on Polars and DuckDB, columnar storage for large tables, and search that combines semantics, a knowledge graph and exact text matching. Many owners in one system, hard isolation between them.
3D in the browser
Drill holes, terrain, mine plans and block models in an ordinary browser — no installs, no special hardware. The same scenes can be stepped into with a VR headset.
Platform
Skarn
Skarn is the platform everything else is built on. It takes geological documents, drill data and field observations and turns them into a knowledge base you can question — cited down to page and interval.
It is under active development and runs in earnest on our own projects before anything is offered to anyone else. Get in touch if you want to know where it stands today.
Data sources
More sources than the open ones
SGU's open geodata is the floor, not the ceiling. Skarn also reads historical mine archives, public registers, licensed datasets and the client's own drill and field data — and keeps track of what each of them may be used for.
-
Open
SGU open geodata
Bedrock, geophysics, drill holes, mineral rights and geochemistry. The baseline everyone has — fetched and kept current automatically.
-
Open
Historical archives
Scanned reports, mine plans and drill logs from the twentieth century, often handwritten. What exists but never became machine-readable.
-
Open
Public registers
Property, permits, protected areas and infrastructure. What decides whether a deposit can be worked in practice, not only in the rock.
-
Licensed
Licensed datasets
Commercial geodata, price series and industry data that require an agreement. The terms travel into the system instead of staying in the contract folder.
-
Client
The client's own data
Drill core, assays, field observations and earlier studies. Often the most valuable material — and the one that must never leak.
- Open sources
- Licensed — held outside
- Client data
Four sources may be combined and merge into one model. The licensed one stops at the gate: still searchable for whoever holds the licence, never part of a shared analysis.
In practice
What the data looks like
Two views of the same rock. Both run in your browser on synthetic data — they show the machinery, not a deposit.
Block model
The rock divided into equal blocks, each with a grade. Raise the cut-off and the low-grade blocks disappear — what remains is the body worth mining.
Drill holes
Five holes from a surface, each split into intervals coloured by grade. A drill hole has a position, a direction and a depth — it is not a row in a spreadsheet.
Drag to rotate. Synthetic holes; the grades follow the same field as the block model.
Same blocks, two worlds
From rock block to network
A block model and a neural network are the same thing seen from two directions: a set of values in space, and the connections you choose to draw between them. Our code moves between those two views constantly.
Drag the model to rotate it. The slider morphs the same set of blocks from a regular mine grid into a layered network — no blocks are created or destroyed on the way.
- RenderingWebGL, instanced geometry
- Blocks216
- DependenciesNo external calls
Illustrative model. No data leaves your browser — everything is computed locally.
Contact
Get in touch
Want to know more about the platform, discuss working together, or just see a demo? Do write — in Swedish or English.
Send an email