USING OPEN ACCESS MINERALOGICAL DATA FROM MINDAT.ORG

The OpenMindat project brings open access to multiple mindat.org datasets. Mindat.org has been built over a period of 23 years as a crowd-sourced project to build the largest mineralogical atlas of mineral occurrences ever created.

Mindat.org consists of multiple database tables built using open source software along with custom code. The majority of these database tables are being made available through the OpenMindat API.

The localities table comprises our hierarchical database of mineral occurrence localities worldwide within, primarily, their political boundaries (country, state, subdivision, etc.) and parallel non-hierarchical localities, which can be described based on a geospatial polygon, can be used to define areas that fall outside or across political boundaries, such as mountain ranges, geological regions or mining regions.

The 'minerals' table, which would better now be described as 'geomaterials' as it includes not just mineral species, but varieties, synonyms, rock types, meteoritic classifications and other phases, contains information about the materials being described, along with physical, chemical, optical and other properties where appropriate. Subsets of data are available, for example a list of IMA-approved mineral species only, or a list of petrological names arranged hierarchically. The mineral occurrences table links these previous two tables together.

There are several other databases available including analytical information and reference data. This presentation will go into greater depth to describe the contents of these tables and how they can be used, and the biases inherent in the data set.

Mindat.org is now providing unique digital identifiers (UUIDs) for all data and the structure and usage of these will be described.

OpenMindat was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant No. 2126315)