Identifier Service in the Mindat Database: Persistent and Structured Access to Massive Records of Minerals and Other Natural Materials

Minerals, like many other natural materials of geological origin (i.e., geomaterials), face the challenge of name variations. This in turn hinders the data-intensive geoscience research, which often needs to integrate data from multiple sources. It is clear that mineral name is not an appropriate identifier to connect records within and amongst data sources. The Mindat database, as one of the biggest resources for open data in mineralogy, has received significant volume of feedback on the heterogeneity of mineral and rock names. To address that issue, we established a persistent identifier service on Mindat to provide persistent and meaningful access to the records of geomaterials (mineral/rock/variety), localities, mineral occurrences, references, photos, and specimens. A key development was the long-form identifier, which adds contextual information such as identifier authorities and data types into the identifier structure. Moreover, a UUID service was built along with the long-form identifier to further increase the interoperability. The identifier service has been successfully implemented to mint millions of identifiers to different types of data objects on Mindat. Several use case scenarios were developed to illustrate the utility of the identifiers in the real world. We believe the persistent identifier will help address the challenges caused by name variations, and we welcome Mindat users to test the identifiers and send feedback to us for future extensions.