Exploiting Mindat for correlations of elements and mineral species

Excellent paper recently published: Using a 3D heat map to explore the diverse correlations among elements and mineral species exploiting the open API to the superb Mindat, one of the largest mineral databases in the world. To explore new associations and knowledge hidden in the big geoscience literature data.

They conclude “This study demonstrates how exploratory data analysis can effectively discover initial patterns in open and big mineral data with appropriate technical developments. As the IMA-approved mineral list continuously grows, the crowd-sourced Mindat database rapidly updates, and the OpenMindat API will thus provide a stable, current service of mineral data. The automated workflow for data retrieval and cleansing built in this study can be adapted to collect various types of correlation data from OpenMindat and then conduct exploratory data analysis in the 3D heat map. Existing knowledge frameworks in mineralogy, such as different parts of the mineral classification systems and the recent studies on mineral ecology and mineral evolution, can also be elaborated on the user interface to add scientific meanings to the data operations. We have already planned a list of new use cases and functions for the extension of the demo system. However, we firmly believe there will be much more innovative scientific topics and data exploration ideas from the geoscience community. The 3D heat map demo system, the data retrieval and cleansing workflow, and all the source code, datasets, and documentation developed in this study are open online. We welcome other researchers to try the existing use cases, adapt the code to build their studies, or send requests to us to collaborate on new use cases and functions for exploratory data analysis.”

Paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590197424000016