This study aims to develop and establish an appropriately co-ordinated regime for infrastructure sharing facilities development and regulation in SSA that could be utilised by the various stakeholders involved in mining infrastructure related activities, as well as those not involved in mineral-related activities, to enable economic diversification and broad-based development within a country. The starting point of the study is the gap that exists within the mining legal framework of Sub-Saharan African countries regarding the development of large scale mining infrastructure related projects such as rails and ports infrastructure networks that require meticulous coordination and collaboration between the numerous stakeholders involved. Consequently, the thesis starts with an introductory chapter that introduces the subject area to be examined in the thesis and provides a rationale for why this topic has been chosen. It also outlines areas of concern within the research topic and sets out the research questions. Subsequently, it sets out the conceptual framework and the necessary analytical tools utilised to evaluate and analyse the concept of shared- use of rail and port infrastructure. Chapter 3 investigates mining infrastructure related projects in Australia, specifically those located in Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland. Chapter 4 explores mining infrastructure related projects in SSA, specifically projects located in Guinea and provide recommendations to SSA countries in general and to the Government of Guinea in particular, on how best to develop shared-use mining infrastructure. Finally, Chapter 5 highlights the findings of the thesis based on the comparison between mining infrastructure development undertaken in Australia with that of the SSA region. The study finds that most countries on the continent suffer from governance gaps expressed in institutional dysfunction, as well as from structures that do not foster collaboration but, on the contrary, deficient environments for national strategies for infrastructure that works for development.

The study was done to understand the direction in which South Africa’s mining model is developed and the changes required for South Africa to take its rightful place in the mainstream spheres of economic and commercial affairs. The huge demand for African commodities is creating new opportunities for African governments to realise the hopes of their people for a better life. The objective of this study is to analyse the South African mining model to determine the sustainability of mining in South Africa. It was done by analysing Chrome, Coal and Platinum as selected minerals and metals. A literature study was conducted and the focus was on the reserves and resources that South Africa has in these minerals and metals, the current supply and demand factors and estimates were done on the future demand. The last part was to determine the state of and planned expansions of infrastructure like Electricity supply, Shipping Ports, Rail transport, Road transport and Water supply that mining operations require. Following the literature study, a survey was conducted in order to support the findings of the literature study and to determine the most important factors that can influence investment decisions in the mining sector by evaluating the investor’s acceptability of South Africa’s mineral and resource industry. It was concluded that the South Africa mining module is well developed with the required skills and knowledge for sustainable mining in the future. It was determined that there would be a future market to maintain a sustainable mining module. The major risk for the sustainable mining module is the reliance on infrastructures required in the mining environment, which is under governmental management. Survey results concluded that South Africa is not an investor-friendly country mainly because of its ineffective administration processes to perform mining. Investors are also seeking for independence of regulatory institutions. A recommendation for future research would be to determine the optimum South African Governmental needs of the investment in infrastructure capital to ensure that the country’s economy will be able to grow.The study was done to understand the direction in which South Africa’s mining model is developed and the changes required for South Africa to take its rightful place in the mainstream spheres of economic and commercial affairs. The huge demand for African commodities is creating new opportunities for African governments to realise the hopes of their people for a better life. The objective of this study is to analyse the South African mining model to determine the sustainability of mining in South Africa. It was done by analysing Chrome, Coal and Platinum as selected minerals and metals. A literature study was conducted and the focus was on the reserves and resources that South Africa has in these minerals and metals, the current supply and demand factors and estimates were done on the future demand. The last part was to determine the state of and planned expansions of infrastructure like Electricity supply, Shipping Ports, Rail transport, Road transport and Water supply that mining operations require. Following the literature study, a survey was conducted in order to support the findings of the literature study and to determine the most important factors that can influence investment decisions in the mining sector by evaluating the investor’s acceptability of South Africa’s mineral and resource industry. It was concluded that the South Africa mining module is well developed with the required skills and knowledge for sustainable mining in the future. It was determined that there would be a future market to maintain a sustainable mining module. The major risk for the sustainable mining module is the reliance on infrastructures required in the mining environment, which is under governmental management. Survey results concluded that South Africa is not an investor-friendly country mainly because of its ineffective administration processes to perform mining. Investors are also seeking for independence of regulatory institutions. A recommendation for future research would be to determine the optimum South African Governmental needs of the investment in infrastructure capital to ensure that the country’s economy will be able to grow. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012

The study was done to understand the direction in which South Africa’s mining model is developed and the changes required for South Africa to take its rightful place in the mainstream spheres of economic and commercial affairs. The huge demand for African commodities is creating new opportunities for African governments to realise the hopes of their people for a better life. The objective of this study is to analyse the South African mining model to determine the sustainability of mining in South Africa. It was done by analysing Chrome, Coal and Platinum as selected minerals and metals. A literature study was conducted and the focus was on the reserves and resources that South Africa has in these minerals and metals, the current supply and demand factors and estimates were done on the future demand. The last part was to determine the state of and planned expansions of infrastructure like Electricity supply, Shipping Ports, Rail transport, Road transport and Water supply that mining operations require. Following the literature study, a survey was conducted in order to support the findings of the literature study and to determine the most important factors that can influence investment decisions in the mining sector by evaluating the investor’s acceptability of South Africa’s mineral and resource industry. It was concluded that the South Africa mining module is well developed with the required skills and knowledge for sustainable mining in the future. It was determined that there would be a future market to maintain a sustainable mining module. The major risk for the sustainable mining module is the reliance on infrastructures required in the mining environment, which is under governmental management. Survey results concluded that South Africa is not an investor-friendly country mainly because of its ineffective administration processes to perform mining. Investors are also seeking for independence of regulatory institutions. A recommendation for future research would be to determine the optimum South African Governmental needs of the investment in infrastructure capital to ensure that the country’s economy will be able to grow.The study was done to understand the direction in which South Africa’s mining model is developed and the changes required for South Africa to take its rightful place in the mainstream spheres of economic and commercial affairs. The huge demand for African commodities is creating new opportunities for African governments to realise the hopes of their people for a better life. The objective of this study is to analyse the South African mining model to determine the sustainability of mining in South Africa. It was done by analysing Chrome, Coal and Platinum as selected minerals and metals. A literature study was conducted and the focus was on the reserves and resources that South Africa has in these minerals and metals, the current supply and demand factors and estimates were done on the future demand. The last part was to determine the state of and planned expansions of infrastructure like Electricity supply, Shipping Ports, Rail transport, Road transport and Water supply that mining operations require. Following the literature study, a survey was conducted in order to support the findings of the literature study and to determine the most important factors that can influence investment decisions in the mining sector by evaluating the investor’s acceptability of South Africa’s mineral and resource industry. It was concluded that the South Africa mining module is well developed with the required skills and knowledge for sustainable mining in the future. It was determined that there would be a future market to maintain a sustainable mining module. The major risk for the sustainable mining module is the reliance on infrastructures required in the mining environment, which is under governmental management. Survey results concluded that South Africa is not an investor-friendly country mainly because of its ineffective administration processes to perform mining. Investors are also seeking for independence of regulatory institutions. A recommendation for future research would be to determine the optimum South African Governmental needs of the investment in infrastructure capital to ensure that the country’s economy will be able to grow. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012

This PhD thesis concerns urban mining, an umbrella term for different recycling strategies aimed to recover materials from the built environment. More specifically, it focuses on hibernating urban infrastructures, that is: cables and pipes that have been left behind in their subsurface location after they were disconnected. I term this subsurface urban realm of system rejects the “Urk World”. “Urk” is short for “urkopplad”, the Swedish word for “disconnected”, an abbreviation often found on old infrastructure maps denoting discarded system parts. Since urks contain high concentrations of copper, my normative stance is that the Urk World should be “mined” as a contribution towards diminishing the persistently wasteful handling of mineral resources in society. The thesis has three focus areas. The first of these discusses how the Urk World has emerged, that is: how the creation of urks is sustained in sociotechnical processes related to infrastructure’s provision. The second concerns the potential of urk mining, how much copper the Urk World contains, where these quantities are located and by which implications they could be recovered. The third focus area is devoted to the politics of urks, and is concerned with the political embeddedness of infrastructure and where politics might intervene for the sake of increased urk recovery. Five papers complete the thesis. The first paper investigates how much copper, aluminium and steel there is in the Urk World of the Swedish city of Norrköping, and how these quantities are spatially dispersed in the urban environment. The second paper is based on interviews with system owners and repair crews, and investigates how urks come into existence in relation to three different infrastructural processes: maintenance, larger installation projects and shutdown. The third paper describes how environmental systems analysis can be beneficially coupled with theories and methods from the social sciences to create knowledge useful to aid the development of urk recycling schemes. The fourth article makes use of the inherent ambiguities of urks to investigate a spectrum of locations where politics aimed for increased urk recovery can intervene as well as what is at stake there. The fifth and final paper investigates urks in Linköping’s power grid in spatial and weight terms, and analyses the implications of urk recovery from several different viewpoints. In overall terms, the major contribution of the thesis is how it improves the knowledge of societal stocks of materials, thereby giving an increased recognition of the built environment as a resource base. In overall scientific terms, it sets an example of how a coherent interdisciplinary research design can provide knowledge useful for the implementation of urk recycling schemes as well as for political decision–making for increased urk recovery.

Mit der wachsenden Popularität von GitHub, dem größten Online-Anbieter von Programm-Quellcode und der größten Kollaborationsplattform der Welt, hat es sich zu einer Big-Data-Ressource entfaltet, die eine Vielfalt von Open-Source-Repositorien (OSR) anbietet. Gegenwärtig gibt es auf GitHub mehr als eine Million Organisationen, darunter solche wie Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, CRAN, RStudio, D3, Plotly und viele mehr. GitHub verfügt über eine umfassende REST API, die es Forschern ermöglicht, wertvolle Informationen über die Entwicklungszyklen von Software und Forschung abzurufen. Unsere Arbeit verfolgt zwei Hauptziele: (I) ein automatisches OSR-Kategorisierungssystem für Data Science Teams und Softwareentwickler zu ermöglichen, das Entdeckbarkeit, Technologietransfer und Koexistenz fördert. (II) Visuelle Daten-Exploration und thematisch strukturierte Navigation innerhalb von GitHub-Organisationen für reproduzierbare Kooperationsforschung und Web-Applikationen zu etablieren. Um Mehrwert aus Big Data zu generieren, ist die Speicherung und Verarbeitung der Datensemantik und Metadaten essenziell. Ferner ist die Wahl eines geeigneten Text Mining (TM) Modells von Bedeutung. Die dynamische Kalibrierung der Metadaten-Konfigurationen, TM Modelle (VSM, GVSM, LSA), Clustering-Methoden und Clustering-Qualitätsindizes wird als "Smart Clusterization" abgekürzt. Data-Driven Documents (D3) und Three.js (3D) sind JavaScript-Bibliotheken, um dynamische, interaktive Datenvisualisierung zu erzeugen. Beide Techniken erlauben Visuelles Data Mining (VDM) in Webbrowsern, und werden als D3-3D abgekürzt. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) misst semantische Information durch Kontingenzanalyse des Textkorpus. Ihre Eigenschaften und Anwendbarkeit für Big-Data-Analytik werden demonstriert. "Smart clusterization", kombiniert mit den dynamischen VDM-Möglichkeiten von D3-3D, wird unter dem Begriff "Dynamic Clustering and Visualization of Smart Data via D3-3D-LSA" zusammengefasst. / With the growing popularity of GitHub, the largest host of source code and collaboration platform in the world, it has evolved to a Big Data resource offering a variety of Open Source repositories (OSR). At present, there are more than one million organizations on GitHub, among them Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, CRAN, RStudio, D3, Plotly and many more. GitHub provides an extensive REST API, which enables scientists to retrieve valuable information about the software and research development life cycles. Our research pursues two main objectives: (I) provide an automatic OSR categorization system for data science teams and software developers promoting discoverability, technology transfer and coexistence; (II) establish visual data exploration and topic driven navigation of GitHub organizations for collaborative reproducible research and web deployment. To transform Big Data into value, in other words into Smart Data, storing and processing of the data semantics and metadata is essential. Further, the choice of an adequate text mining (TM) model is important. The dynamic calibration of metadata configurations, TM models (VSM, GVSM, LSA), clustering methods and clustering quality indices will be shortened as "smart clusterization". Data-Driven Documents (D3) and Three.js (3D) are JavaScript libraries for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations, featuring hardware acceleration for rendering complex 2D or 3D computer animations of large data sets. Both techniques enable visual data mining (VDM) in web browsers, and will be abbreviated as D3-3D. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) measures semantic information through co-occurrence analysis in the text corpus. Its properties and applicability for Big Data analytics will be demonstrated. "Smart clusterization" combined with the dynamic VDM capabilities of D3-3D will be summarized under the term "Dynamic Clustering and Visualization of Smart Data via D3-3D-LSA".