OpenMindat: Open and FAIR mineralogy data from the Mindat database

Abstract

The open data movement has brought revolutionary changes to the field of mineralogy. With a growing number of datasets made available through community efforts, researchers are now able to explore new scientific topics such as mineral ecology, mineral evolution and new classification systems. The recent results have shown that the necessary open data coupled with data science skills and expertise in mineralogy will lead to impressive new scientific discoveries. Yet, feedback from researchers also reflects the needs for better FAIRness of open data, that is, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable for both humans and machines. In this paper, we present our recent work on building the open data service of Mindat, one of the largest mineral databases in the world. In the past years, Mindat has supported numerous scientific studies but a machine interface for data access has never been established. Through the OpenMindat project we have achieved solid progress on two activities: (1) cleanse data and improve data quality, and (2) build a data sharing platform and establish a machine interface for data query and access. We hope OpenMindat will help address the increasing data needs from researchers in mineralogy for an internationally recognized authoritative database that is fully compliant with the FAIR guiding principles and helps accelerate scientific discoveries.