Xiaogang Ma

Xiaogang (Marshall) Ma is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Idaho. He received his Ph.D. degree of Earth Systems Science and GIScience from University of Twente, Netherlands in 2011, and then completed postdoctoral training of Data Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on deploying data science in the Semantic Web to support cross-disciplinary collaboration and scientific discovery, with broad interests in complex systems in Earth and environmental sciences, data interoperability and provenance, and visualized exploratory analysis of Big and Small Data.

Mindat open data service and its potential for mineral exploration

Mindat.org is the world’s largest database about mineral species and their distributions. Since its inception on the Web in the year of 2000, Mindat has gradually evolved into a popular open data resource amongst researchers, educators, students, and the public. Together with many other open geoscience data resources, Mindat has underpinned many innovative scientific discoveries in mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, and more. Recently, researchers have also begun to explore the potential of using Mindat in mineral exploration. Some initial work, such as the prediction of mineral species occurrence and the predication of the paragenetic modes of a mineral deposit, has been achieved. Facing the increasing need of open data, Mindat has also established a machine interface for data query and access, and the corresponding Python and R packages have been built. This presentation will give a quick overview of the Mindat open data service and a few Mindat website functions that might of interest to researchers in the field of mineral exploration.