GeoKB Mindat presentation

The following is a set of web references and notes for a presentation on the GeoKB and how it relates to Mindat.

• Strategy Infographic
  • Briefly hit on why we're doing this and the strategy we are taking. Focus today is on the knowledge-banking piece.
• GeoKB
  • We're building this capability in Wikibase as part of the wikibase.cloud beta environment being developed by Wikimedia Deutschland. We're doing that partly to take advantage of an instance of tech that we don't have to build out and operate ourselves but mostly because of the underlying ethos. The idea with wikibase.cloud is to have many domain-specific knowledge bases sitting adjacent to Wikidata, which we can consider the Global Knowledge Commons. This is a powerful concept to latch onto. We've learned from the "Open Access Movement" in government, that it's not enough to just put our data and information out there without also contributing our knowledge, encoded in ways that humans and AIs can use.
• MRData
  • We have done this work to some extent in pockets around our organization, including in the mineral resources realm. MRData was the result of one guy's (Peter Schweitzer) passionate pursuit of an interconnected suite of all the major data and information we have and produce.
• MRData Science Topic Catalog
  • It's a web interface with some degree of machine access to thousands of databases and discrete products connected through earth system concepts, some of which have reasonable semantic depth.
• MRDS
  • Some of the connected databases that are part of the MRData suite are built out from a long legacy. The Mineral Resources Data System goes back to former US Bureau of Mines sources. It was meant to be a living data system of the best available information on mineral deposits, prospecting history, and related data (nationally and globally), which is one of the most important inputs to our mineral resource assessments.
• Blackbird Mine & [

https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/show-mrds.php?dep_id=10096235 Idaho Cobalt] & Idaho Cobalt Operations

• • MRDS provides a lot of the information in this area we need moving forward. However, it is not designed for multimodal input. We need a knowledge bank that multiple people and processes can contribute to through time.
  • Show the progression through the only cobalt mining in the U.S.
  • It's also not set up to accommodate other dimensions on the same entities related to other scientific domains that USGS is engaged in. In this case, that same mine has other things USGS as a whole needs to know about like connections to mine waste and pollutants into the watersheds it sits within that flow into the Salmon River in Idaho impacting salmon reintroduction efforts from both the Federal government and the Shoshone-Bannock tribe. We need a system that can accommodate ever increasing detail across a limitless set of conceptual dimensions.