MINERAL INFORMATICS: EXPLORING MINERALS TO UNDERSTAND OUR PLANET, SOLAR SYSTEM AND MORE

Durable and information-rich, minerals are the only ancient relics that offer direct, solid glimpses of eons of planetary transformation. It is important to extract, analyze, and interpret this abundance of information in order to improve our understanding of the planetary bodies in our solar system and the role our planet’s geosphere played in the origin and evolution of life. Data driven efforts in mineralogy have been gradually increasing in the past couple of decades. The development and application of data science and analytics methods to mineralogy, while extremely promising, has also been somewhat ad-hoc in nature. In order to systematize and synthesize the direction of these efforts, we introduce the concept of “Mineral Informatics”. Mineral Informatics is the next frontier for researchers working with mineral data. In this contribution, we present our vision for Mineral Informatics, the X-Informatics underpinnings that led to its conception, the needs, challenges, opportunities, and future directions.