HR: 0800h
AN: SF41A-0766    [Abstracts]
TI: GEOROC - Current and Upcoming Activities
AU: * Sarbas, B
EM: sarbas@mpch-mainz.mpg.de
AF: Max-Planck Institut fuer Chemie, Postfach 3060, Mainz, 55020 Germany
AU: Nohl, U
EM: nohl@mpch-mainz.mpg.de
AF: Max-Planck Institut fuer Chemie, Postfach 3060, Mainz, 55020 Germany
AB: Since its introduction about five years ago, the geochemical database GEOROC of the Max-Planck-Institut f�r Chemie in Mainz established itself as a major resource available to the scientific community. In spring 2003, together with the databases PetDB and NAVDAT it has initiated the EarthChem consortium, with the aim to increase the synergy between the three geochemical database efforts and to build up a broad cyberinfrastructure for the Solid Earth Geochemistry. GEOROC provides geochemical data published for volcanic whole rocks, minerals and inclusions from ocean islands, large igneous provinces and convergent margins. Currently, the database is being expanded to samples from Archean cratons. Data for representative greenstone belts from Canada, South Africa, Russia, and Australia have been included with the latest update. The database now provides about 170,000 analyses published in 4,100 papers. The web interface allows the selection of samples by bibliographic, tectonic, geographic, petrological as well as chemical criteria. Recently, GEOROC has been implemented to an SQL server. This improved the performance of the web interface considerably, compared to the former MS Access-based version. The speed of queries as well as the possible size of data downloads increased. In addition, it removed restrictions in the possible number of simultaneous users of the database, an improvement that is essential when considering the constant increase in number of users to currently more than 5000 per month. In cooperation with the other members of EarthChem, the quality of the petrological metadata will be improved. At the moment, the rock name is adopted from the original publications without modifications. As a result, GEOROC contains more than 2000 different rock names. For many samples, instead of a rock name only terms like "pillow" or "lava" are available. Thus, further classification tools, besides the already available (Na$_{2}$O+K$_{2}$O) vs. SiO$_{2}$ TAS diagram, are necessary to help the user to query for rocks based on chemical composition, irrespective of the rock name given in the original publication. The revision of metadata will also include additions of geographic information beyond that given in the original publications. A consistent structuring of locations into given sequences from major to minor location subunits is necessary to utilize the full potential of the GEOROC web interface. To further improve the capabilities of the databases GEOROC, PetDB and NAVDAT, the development of a common web interface is in progress. This interface will contain basic query criteria based on bibliography, geography and rock names and will allow simultaneous access to all three datasets. More specific researches have to be done in the individual web pages of the databases. A further extension of GEOROC and also part of the common web interface will be spatial data queries and analyses. They will allow the selection of samples by drawing polygons on maps as well as the plotting and interpretation of chemical data against geography.
UR: http://georoc.mpch-mainz.gwdg.de
DE: 3655 Major element composition
DE: 3670 Minor and trace element composition
DE: 1040 Isotopic composition/chemistry
DE: 1065 Trace elements (3670)
DE: 0910 Data processing
SC: Special Focus: Advances in Data Acquisition, Management, Analysis and Display [SF]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting