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Curtin University: Digital Mineral Library

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Curtin University: Digital Mineral Library
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7
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CC Attribution 4.0 International:
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The John de Laeter Centre for Isotope Research (JDLC), headquartered at Curtin University, is a Perth-based multi-institutional research infrastructure centre providing the academic, resources and environmental research sector with advanced analytical facilities and expertise. This video explores the reasons why open data is critical to the mineral and mining industry. The Centre has commissioned a number of new instruments generating data relating to digital mineralogy and materials characterisation for pure and applied research. The new mineral analyser TESCAN TIMA instrument will be used on up to 2,000 samples from the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA), characterising the mineralogy of the samples into searchable digital mineralogical and geochemical datasets. This ANDS project has created an appropriate metadata schema for these datasets, captured and enhanced the metadata for a 150 sample subset of the collection under that schema and make that metadata available to Research Data Australia and the AuScope portal to facilitate discovery and access to the datasets by the international research community.
Projective planeSampling (statistics)DigitizingLibrary (computing)
Directory serviceSampling (statistics)
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Sampling (statistics)Projective planeCollaborationismArchaeological field survey
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Digital libraryStandard deviationSoftware bug
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Public domainComputer animation
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Multiplication signComplex (psychology)Universe (mathematics)
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
The Digital Mineral Library is a project where we take samples that are traditionally stored on the shelves of the Geological Survey of Western Australia and there'll be thousands of samples in this format, in bags, systematically stored and collected. We're generating the data here in the Johns Later Centre.
We're sourcing the samples from the Geological Survey of Western Australia, which is a collaborator in this project. The Geological Survey has been mapping the state for decades and over the last 20 years have been systematically collecting samples and analysing them in our centre.
What we're doing is actually creating a digital library of standard rock types which don't necessarily have geochemical anomalies and that will provide industry with an understanding of what background looks like, what rocks look like when they're actually not mineralised.
So I think that's important for the minerals industry in their exploration process. The importance of this project was that it allows us to take detailed data from an instrument, be able to manipulate it into a frame which could be used both nationally and internationally as well as for researchers in Western Australia.
The implications of that is that if we can do that across the whole of the organisation at an instrument level, then we change the whole process of accessibility and timeliness of data in the institution. We embarked on this project because we realised that only a relatively small percentage of the data that's generated and analysed in research laboratories actually makes it into the public domain.
The conventional publication route is a very effective way of academics to get information to each other and that is the way the system works. What we're trying to do is to open up these data sets to the broader research community
so that they can explore them and figure out how they might be useful in their own needs. Research data is increasing in size and complexity and I've worked at universities for a long time and I've seen over that period of time how important it is for researchers to work together with data that's already been produced by others.
So for me it's a fundamental thing about this information is available and a lot of it is government funded and therefore it should be available to everybody to use and to make new discoveries that everybody can benefit from. I believe that that's the way of the future. Industry partnering with the government and the academic research community is going to be critical.
We need to realise that Australia is in competition for attracting investment dollars around the world and we have to be able to provide a better source of information to explorers so that they will stay here and they will explore our country and invest in our country.