The open data movement has brought revolutionary changes to the field of mineralogy. With a growing number of datasets made available through community efforts, researchers are now able to explore new scientific topics such as mineral ecology, mineral evolution and new classification systems. The recent results have shown that the necessary open data coupled with data science skills and expertise in mineralogy will lead to impressive new scientific discoveries. Yet, feedback from researchers also reflects the needs for better FAIRness of open data, that is, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable for both humans and machines. In this paper, we present our recent work on building the open data service of Mindat, one of the largest mineral databases in the world. In the past years, Mindat has supported numerous scientific studies but a machine interface for data access has never been established. Through the OpenMindat project we have achieved solid progress on two activities: (1) cleanse data and improve data quality, and (2) build a data sharing platform and establish a machine interface for data query and access. We hope OpenMindat will help address the increasing data needs from researchers in mineralogy for an internationally recognized authoritative database that is fully compliant with the FAIR guiding principles and helps accelerate scientific discoveries.
In recent years, the concept of “open data” has received increasing attention among data providers and publishers. For some data portals in public sectors, such as data.gov, the openness enables public oversight of governmental proceedings. For many other data portals, especially those in academia, open data has shown its potential for driving new scientific discoveries and creating opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration. While the number of open data portals and the volume of shared data have increased significantly, most open data portals still use keywords and faceted models as their primary methods for data search and discovery. There should be opportunities to incorporate more intelligent functions to facilitate the data flow between data portals and end-users. To find more theoretical and empirical evidence for that proposition, in this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review of open data, social trust, and recommender systems to explain the fundamental concepts and illustrate the potential of using trust-based recommender systems for open data portals. We hope this literature review can benefit practitioners in the field of open data and facilitate the discussion of future work.
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