"Information required for complete geological and engineering descriptions of tar sand and heavy oil deposits has been identified. Geological descriptions of the Athabasca and Asphalt Ridge deposits have been prepared. However, little information about many of the engineering properties, such as magnitude and direction of minimum ad maximum permeability's, is available in the literature. The data base will, in its early stages, contain little engineering data. A computerized data base, developed at the Alberta Research Council, includes information on the visual examination of whole oil sand and determination of physical and chemical properties of whole oil and bitumen. Data from collaborative studies sponsored by the Alberta Committee on Oil Sands Analysis and the Phillips Petroleum Company were used to estimate the precision of data in the open literature that would be entered into the data base. These studies showed that systematic errors during analysis (i.e. lack of agreement between laboratories for properties of a single sample) will seriously diminish the significance of a single data point in the data base. This type of data can best be used to estimate the typical properties of a deposit."