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I am building an open source spatial geochemical/geological observational database for mineral exploration. I need to fill the mineral lookup table.

Where can I find a complete list of all minerals and mineral-groups, chemical formula, Strunz and/or Dana number, or any other data.

I want the Strunz and/or Dana numbers so I can query the data and recode the data based upon mineral groups.

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    $\begingroup$ Are you familiar with mindat.org and webmineral.com ? $\endgroup$
    – Gimelist
    May 6, 2016 at 8:29
  • $\begingroup$ I am but there is no clear simple way to download the data. I actually got the feeling that they don't want people to download their data, just use the Web interface $\endgroup$
    – Phillip Allen
    May 6, 2016 at 17:23
  • $\begingroup$ Did you ask them? Try contacting the people behind it $\endgroup$
    – Gimelist
    May 6, 2016 at 22:08
  • $\begingroup$ nrmima.nrm.se/IMA_Master_List_2016-03.pdf Is that what you're looking for? $\endgroup$
    – Gimelist
    May 7, 2016 at 12:19
  • $\begingroup$ Would the Elsevier Mineral and Rock table help you out? Link here: sdgs.usd.edu/pubs/Scans/… Note that it's a 20mb jpeg, so maybe right-click>Save As to avoid browser crashes $\endgroup$
    – Ben MS
    May 8, 2016 at 23:56

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After looking at the source from nrmima.nrm.se/IMA_Master_List_2016-03.pdf, I discovered the: IMA Database of Mineral Properties Created and maintained by the RRUFF Project in partnership with the IMA http://rruff.info/ima/

I downloaded all the minerals in a csv file. This worked very well for two reasons. First they had various chemical formula formats that were favorable for entry into a database. Second they had a mineral group column. The mineral group column was very important since often in the field the exact mineral is not noted but a group such as chlorite or garnet. I will worry about Strunz or Dana numbers/codes at a later date.

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There is probably no such thing as a totally comprehensive list of minerals because nobody agrees upon what constitutes a mineral, as opposed to a multiple variants of the same mineral. There is also a grey area between 'natural' and 'synthetic'.
That said, however, the international centre for diffraction data (i.e. for X-ray powder diffraction work) has a recent catalogue of minerals called PDF-4 +2015, which includes more than 365,000 entries! You may have to sift through the catalogue to determine which are genuinely natural minerals that you want in your own catalogue. The '-4' indicates actual minerals as opposed to pharmaceuticals etc, which are under a different catalogue. You can access their flyer from:

http://www.icdd.com/products/flyers/PDF-4plus.pdf

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    $\begingroup$ There are clear definitions as to what is a mineral, as opposed to variants of the same mineral. These definitions are being constantly updated as well. The grey area between 'natural' and 'synthetic' is extremely tiny and limited to just a few minerals that were first discovered in anthropogenic settings. For more info: nrmima.nrm.se $\endgroup$
    – Gimelist
    May 10, 2016 at 11:52

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