[Rockhounds] Fw: SOFTWARE FOR INDENTIFYING MINERALS

[Jim Daly]

This is an important point. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I use Mindat a lot. The main frustration I have with it is that when I call up a list of minerals from a given locality, then click on one of the minerals to get a description/pictures, I get a general description. What I really need is to know what that mineral looks like from that specific locality. The only way I can get that information now is if the locality has been written up in a journal I have access to. These are some of the "factoids" that have to be captured in an expert system, and it really takes identification tables to another level entirely.
  Jim Daly

Rik Dillen <rik.dillen at skynet.be> wrote:
  I agree with Pete.
For relatively easy cases you don't need artificial intelligence... you need experience.
For difficult cases the type of expert systems we are talking about wouldn't work. Imagine that you would have to
differentiate between all types of greenish minerals from the vicinity of Schwaz, Austria ? It's even sometimes very
hard to identify them positively in the scanning electron microscope w/ EDX.
And what about all kinds of (sub-microscopic) intergrowths, solid solution cases, pseudomorphs etc. ?

Proper identification of minerals is a profession. Of course, some part of the mineralogical species can be recognized
with the naked eye (if well crystallized), but a large part can only be identified with some approximation and a limited
degree of certainty, if no heavy weapons (XRD, SEM/EDX/WDX...) are allowed :>)
It is e.g. quite impossible to recognize small grains of all kinds of sulphosalts without $$$$$ instruments.
It is also very difficult to put some data in an expert system that have to do with complex experience, such as knowing
that in dolomite of the Lengenbach Quarry (Switzerland), if your material comes from the southern part of the quarry,
the gray sulphosalts on specimens that contain realgar are almost always sartorite (skleroclase) or baumbauerite, almost
never dufrenoysite... this not being true for recently mined material from the central part of the quarry. How would you
put that in an expert system ?

One important criterion is the locality and the literature on it, but even that is not always enough.

       
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