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Abstract Minerals are information-rich materials that offer researchers a glimpse into the evolution of planetary bodies. Thus, it is important to extract, analyze, and interpret this abundance of information to improve our understanding of the planetary bodies in our solar system and the role our planet’s geosphere played in the origin and evolution of life. Over the past several decades, data-driven efforts in mineralogy have seen a gradual increase. The development and application of data science and analytics methods to mineralogy, while extremely promising, has also been somewhat ad hoc in nature. To systematize and synthesize the direction of these efforts, we introduce the concept of “Mineral Informatics,” which is the next frontier for researchers working with mineral data. In this paper, we present our vision for Mineral Informatics and the X-Informatics underpinnings that led to its conception, as well as the needs, challenges, opportunities, and future directions of the field. The intention of this paper is not to create a new specific field or a sub-field as a separate silo, but to document the needs of researchers studying minerals in various contexts and fields of study, to demonstrate how the systemization and enhanced access to mineralogical data will increase cross- and interdisciplinary studies, and how data science and informatics methods are a key next step in integrative mineralogical studies. 

Geochemistry is a data-driven discipline. Modern laboratories produce highly diverse data, and the recent exponential increase in data volumes is challenging established practices and capabilities for organizing, analyzing, preserving, and accessing these data. At the same time, sophisticated computational techniques, including machine learning, are increasingly applied to geochemical research questions, which require easy access to large volumes of high-quality, well-organized, and standardized data. Data management has been important since the beginning of geochemistry but has recently become a necessity for the discipline to thrive in the age of digitalization and artificial intelligence. This paper summarizes the landscape of geochemical databases, distinguishing different types of data systems based on their purpose, and their evolution in a historic context. We apply the life cycle model of geochemical data; explain the relevance of current standards, practices, and policies that determine the design of modern geochemical databases and data management; the ethics of data reuse such as data ownership, data attribution, and data citation; and finally create a vision for the future of geochemical databases: data being born digital, connected to agreed community standards, and contributing to global democratization of geochemical data. 

Integrating mineralogy with data science is critical to modernizing Earth materials research and its applications to geosciences. Data were compiled on 95 650 garnet sample analyses from a variety of sources, ranging from large repositories (EarthChem, RRUFF, MetPetDB) to individual peer-reviewed literature. An important feature is the inclusion of mineralogical “dark data” from papers published prior to 1990. Garnets are commonly used as indicators of formation environments, which directly correlate with their geochemical properties; thus, they are an ideal subject for the creation of an extensive data resource that incorporates composition, locality information, paragenetic mode, age, temperature, pressure, and geochemistry. For the data extracted from existing databases and literature, we increased the resolution of several key aspects, including petrogenetic and paragenetic attributes, which we extended from generic material type (e.g., igneous, metamorphic) to more specific rock-type names (e.g., diorite, eclogite, skarn) and locality information, increasing specificity by examining the continent, country, area, geological context, longitude, and latitude. Likewise, we utilized end-member and quality index calculations to help assess the garnet sample analysis quality. This comprehensive dataset of garnet information is an open-access resource available in the Evolutionary System of Mineralogy Database (ESMD) for future mineralogical studies, paving the way for characterizing correlations between chemical composition and paragenesis through natural kind clustering (Chiama et al., 2022; https://doi.org/10.48484/camh-xy98). We encourage scientists to contribute their own unpublished and unarchived analyses to the growing data repositories of mineralogical information that are increasingly valuable for advancing scientific discovery. 

Thanks to substantial support for biodiversity data mobilization in recent decades, billions of occurrence records are openly available, documenting life on Earth and enabling timely research, awareness raising, and policy-making. Initiatives across local to global scales have been separately funded to serve different, yet often overlapping audiences of data users, and have developed a variety of platforms and infrastructures to meet the needs of these audiences. The independent progress of biodiversity data providers has led to innovations as well as challenges for the community at large as we move towards connecting and linking a diversity of information from disparate sources as Digital Extended Specimens (DES). Recognizing a need for deeper and more frequent opportunities for communication and collaboration across the globe, an ad-hoc group of representatives of various international, national, and regional organizations have been meeting virtually since 2020 to provide a forum for updates, announcements, and shared progress. This group is provisionally named International Partners for the Digital Extended Specimen (IPDES), and is guided by these four concepts: Biodiversity, Connection, Knowledge and Agency. Participants in IPDES include representatives of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN), Natural Science Collections Alliance (NSCA), Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), National Specimen Information Infrastructure of China (NSII), and South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), as well as individuals involved with biodiversity informatics initiatives, natural science collections, museums, herbaria, and universities. Our global partners group strives to increase representation from around the globe as we aim to enable research that contributes to novel discoveries and addresses the societal challenges leading to the biodiversity crisis. Our overarching mission is to expand on the community-driven successes to connect biodiversity data and knowledge through coordination of a globally integrated network of stakeholders to enable an extensible technical and social infrastructure of data, tools, and working practices in support of our vision. The main work of our group thus far includes publishing a paper on the Digital Extended Specimen (Hardisty et al. 2022), organizing and hosting an array of activities at conferences, and asynchronous online work and forum-based exchanges. We aim to advance discussion on topics of broad interest to our community such as social and technical capacity building, broadening participation, expanding social and data networks, improving data models and building a backbone for the DES, and identifying international funding solutions. This presentation will highlight some of these activities and detail progress towards a roadmap for the development of the human network and technical infrastructure necessary to support the DES. It provides an opportunity for feedback from and engagement by stakeholder communities such as TDWG and other initiatives with a focus on data standards and biodiversity informatics, as we solidify our plans for the future in support of integrated and interconnected biodiversity data and credit for those doing the work. 

 

Abstract Sampling the natural world and built environment underpins much of science, yet systems for managing material samples and associated (meta)data are fragmented across institutional catalogs, practices for identification, and discipline-specific (meta)data standards. The Internet of Samples (iSamples) is a standards-based collaboration to uniquely, consistently, and conveniently identify material samples, record core metadata about them, and link them to other samples, data, and research products. iSamples extends existing resources and best practices in data stewardship to render a cross-domain cyberinfrastructure that enables transdisciplinary research, discovery, and reuse of material samples in 21st century natural science.