Global Earth Mineral Inventory : A DCO Data Legacy

Geologists and geology enthusiasts have been collecting mineral samples and compiling data about these samples for as long as we can remember. Datasets like those found at 'RRUFF.info' and 'Mindat.org' have documented almost all the known mineral localities in the world. One of the Deep Time Data Infrastructure (http://dtdi.carnegiescience.edu/) project's main goals has been to create and merge datasets from various scientific fields, and use statistical methods, and visualization tools that inspire and test hypotheses applicable to modeling Earth's past environment. In order to achieve this goal, our team has been compiling various geological properties of minerals and linking them to the above mentioned mineral locality datasets. Integrating these resources into a digestible format for exploration and analysis helps researchers gain valuable insights from the mineral data.

The 'Global Earth Mineral Inventory' can be considered as a knowledge graph or network being with every node representing some feature of the datasets. Exploring a combination of the nodes gives the researcher a faceted view of the data required for the task at hand. This inventory is accessible to researchers through the Deep Carbon Observatory Data Portal (https://deepcarbon.net/data-portal). This contribution describes our team's efforts in compiling the Global Earth Mineral Inventory, the Data Policies for usage and sharing, and the completion and impact metrics for the Data Legacy. Researchers using this data are able to cite the data publication for the 'Global Earth Mineral Inventory'. Datasets are integrated to enable quick, open access for researchers. We consider such data resources to be 'Data Legacies' and as valuable as scientific papers written about minerals.