thumb|upright|Crystalline copper "feather" from Itauz Mine, [[Kazakhstan, an example of a photo from the Mindat database.]]

Mindat.org is a non-commercial interactive online database covering minerals around the world. Originally created by Jolyon Ralph as a private project in 1993, it was launched as a community-editable website in October 2000. it is operated by the Hudson Institute of Mineralogy.

History

Mindat was started in 1993 as a personal database project by Jolyon Ralph. He then developed further versions as a Microsoft Windows application before launching a community-editable database website on 10 October 2000.

After further development taking to the Internet stage, Mindat.org became an outreach program of the Hudson Institute of Mineralogy, To address the increasing open data needs from individual researchers and organizations, Mindat.org has started to build and maintain an open data API for data query and access, and the efforts have received support from the National Science Foundation.

Description

Mindat claims to be the largest mineral database and mineralogical reference website on the Internet. It is crowd-sourced and also expert-reviewed and curated for data quality. The database is used by professional mineralogists, geologists, and amateur mineral collectors alike, and is referenced in many publications.

The database covers a variety of topics: scientific articles, field trip reports, mining history, advice for collectors, book reviews,

, it included:

References

  • Mindat.org - 10 years online today (archived copy)
  • Gemdat.org a related website