This paper presents an enhanced 3D heat map for exploratory data analysis (EDA) of open mineral data, addressing the challenges caused by rapidly evolving datasets and ensuring scientifically meaningful data exploration. The Mindat website, a crowd-sourced database of mineral species, provides a constantly updated open data source via its newly established application programming interface (API…
Mineral evolution, the study of the diversity and temporal distribution of Earth’s crystalline phases, posits that mineral species have diversified over the past 4.5 billion years as a result of varied physical, chemical, and biological processes. The complementary field of mineral ecology is the study of the diversity and spatial distribution of mineral species on Earth and other terrestrial…