SEMANTICS AS A BOOST FOR THE OPEN DATA AND OPEN SCIENCE ECOSYSTEM OF MINERALOGY

Open data and open science activities are increasingly discussed in the geoscience communities, including the field of mineralogy. As many datasets are now shared on the Internet, they should be well documented and organized in a way that is easy to discover, access, and analyze. However, in the past ten years, our practice and observation of data science activities in mineralogy have shown many gaps in the digital world that hinders a smooth data life cycle. Many of those gaps and challenges are related to machine-readable semantics, such as the mineral name list, rock classification system, and structured access to open data. Recently, through an NSF EarthCube project (#2126315), we have made significant progress on the semantic enrichment of the Mindat database, a popular data source in the field of mineralogy. This presentation will introduce the survey and technical developments we have done so far to address the semantic challenges, the features of the open data products from Mindat, and a few use cases that have applied the Mindat open data. A virtuous open science ecosystem needs necessary building blocks of data, software, and computing facilities, but more importantly, it needs the participation of scientists with complementary expertise to collaborate on scientific discoveries. We welcome more people to use the Mindat open data and join the collaboration on open science practices.