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Improving Mindat.orgLocality Association tool.

15th May 2026 21:56 UTCJolyon Ralph 🌟 Founder OP

On locality search menus there's a new option (or there will be when caches clear) for Mineral Association.

Here's an example (you need to be logged in for it to work):

It shows associations between minerals based on that locality and sublocalities. An association is where two or more minerals are listed on the same specimen. 

Click on nodes to see the links from each node more clearly.





16th May 2026 03:34 UTCHerwig Pelckmans

A few things:
* what data is/are used to generate this? Only the photo titles, or also the minerals mentioned in the captions?
* what's the main purpose of these tools?

General remark: when I surfed to the page mentioned above, and saw the "gigantic spiderweb", and looked at the table underneath, I noticed that galena was among the biggest nodes.
But I could not find that node.
Then finally I realized that only a part of the spiderweb was visible, and that galena was just "out of view".
=> maybe it's an idea to make that "spiderweb view" "zoomable", so people could zoom out to see it entirely?

16th May 2026 05:11 UTCKevin Conroy Manager

Herwig Pelckmans  ✉️

looked at the table underneath, I noticed that galena was among the biggest nodes
Did you click "Select" in the galena line?

16th May 2026 09:39 UTCJolyon Ralph 🌟 Founder OP

Herwig Pelckmans  ✉️

=> maybe it's an idea to make that "spiderweb view" "zoomable", so people could zoom out to see it entirely?
 It is. using your mouse scrollwheel, or pinch/zoom on a touch device. 

18th May 2026 18:55 UTCtiny minerals

Could you clarify for me how to reach this tool for a given locality?  I've tried several different search menus, the locality page, mineral information both global and at the locality level, and the photo search.  I am logged in, and the linked example works for me which is why I want to try it out for other places!

18th May 2026 19:06 UTCJolyon Ralph 🌟 Founder OP

if the menu item isn't showing its because the menu won't change until the cache is cleared for that locality - fortunately if you take the id of the locality you are interested in and replace the id= number on the URL above it should take you to the right page

18th May 2026 19:10 UTCtiny minerals

Got it, thank you. 

18th May 2026 23:06 UTCtiny minerals

Could you briefly discuss what the different components are?  Placement, matches, score, and what the percentages mean?  I pulled up the visualizer for a district I'm familiar with, Hansonburg in New Mexico (locality id 3981, https://www.mindat.org/locality_assemblage.php?id=3981).  The first mineral that caught my eye was baryte, as it was located far off to one side and only had one connection, which seemed odd.  On a hunch I changed the number of edges, this sharply increased the number of connections, which makes sense - a lot of possibles must be left out for this to even work on a big locality, hence the number "hidden by the edge limit."  Is setting the edge limit higher a huge resource sink?  Should I be wary of doing so, or is it just going to be occasionally slow?

I went back to the default value for edges, and looked at baryte's single connection - witherite, which I am not familiar with.  The link reports 227 matches.  Baryte to witherite has no entry, witherite to baryte has a score of 78.28%.  I'm not sure what these percentages mean - I did find a few (e.g. calcite-dolomite) that had % in both lines, I vaguely expected them to add up to 100% but they do not.  The only place I recall seeing associations previously is in photos, but witherite has no photos in this district.  Is this data perhaps being pulled from some other source in the database?

Finally there is a score, but I don't know how to interpret it.

I did attempt to drag busy nodes, and was able to somewhat rearrange them, but could not get them to drag far or somewhat isolate them.  

When trying to hover over the edges (pairings), it was sometimes challenging to get the right one in busy areas.  I might suggest that, when you have a mineral selected, only its connections provide a popup.

I did shift to smaller localities and was able to see the interesting connections smoothly.

What an interesting tool!  Thanks for putting it together.
 
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Copyright © mindat.org and the Hudson Institute of Mineralogy 1993-2026, except where stated. Most political location boundaries are © OpenStreetMap contributors. Mindat.org relies on the contributions of thousands of members and supporters. Founded in 2000 by Jolyon Ralph and Ida Chau.
To cite: Ralph, J., Von Bargen, D., Martynov, P., Zhang, J., Que, X., Prabhu, A., Morrison, S. M., Li, W., Chen, W., & Ma, X. (2025). Mindat.org: The open access mineralogy database to accelerate data-intensive geoscience research. American Mineralogist, 110(6), 833–844. doi:10.2138/am-2024-9486.
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