U.S. BUREAU OF MINES SPECIAL PUBLICATION 12-95

Mineral Availability System/

Minerals Industry Location System CD-ROM

MAS/MILS CD-ROM

DATA DICTIONARY

The information on this CD-ROM was extracted from the Minerals Availability System/Mineral Industry Location System (MAS/MILS) database. MAS/MILS was developed to do systematic assessment of the future supply of strategic and critical minerals and to record mineral sites identified in mineral land assessment campaigns for the United States Government. The MAS/MILS database has two basic components - MAS and MILS.

The MAS part is focused on 34 mineral commodities. It has extensive data on about 5,000 significant mineral deposits, mining operations and processing plants worldwide. This detailed information was developed to classify identified domestic and foreign mineral resources according to their respective extraction technologies, economics, and availability. Much of this information specifies engineering cost elements and estimates the economic viability of individual mineral operations. These proprietary fields are not available to the general public.

 The MILS part covers more commodities and has records for over 221,000 mineral occurrences, deposits, mines and processing plants.

Ninety percent of these are in the United States. This more general information is used to support government agencies which have land-use planning responsibilities. These agencies look to the Bureau of Mines both for mineral resource assessments and for help identifying and remediating inactive and abandoned mine hazards. The mineral industry has obtained this data to assist in exploration activities.

 The information provided on this CD-ROM is targeted at users interested in a geographically referenced list of mineral sites.

The data fields included enable searches of selected, non-proprietary information from the MAS/MILS database by such criteriaas political boundary, geographical coordinates, or particular commodity associated with an occurrence. Data for a total of 221,151 separate locations are contained on this CD-ROM. Five browse screens - general identification, location, commodity, cross reference, and land status - display related collections of some fields. Limitations in the extraction software has restricted the number of fields that could be handled in an efficient manner. The 78 fields contained on this CD-ROM originated from four ORACLE Tables in the MAS/MILS database. ORACLE, the host software used for the MAS/MILS database, defines a Table as a set of information which is connected to other sets of information in a relational format. These Four Tables are the Mineral Industry Location System (MILS) Table, the Commodity Table, The Alternate Name Table, and the Bibliography Table.

 On the CD-ROM, these fields (except the Bibliography File) were combined into one data record structure which corresponds to each entry on the CD-ROM - MAS/MILS database. A short description of the general structure of the data fields as well as a dictionary of the valid data options for each field follows. The field definitions are the same ones relied on by the numerous evaluators who have developed the MAS/MILS data over the last 19 years.

The information contained in the associated Bibliography has been extracted into a separate file. Bibliographic information for a particular deposit can be accessed through its corresponding 10-digit sequence number.

 GENERAL STRUCTURE

The BIBLIOGRAPHIC data file on this CD-ROM contains material relating

to the same set of mineral properties. The format of each line is

free-form.

BIBLIOGRAPHY FILE

NAME/Item Description Size

SEQuence number 10 char.

TABle reference 2 char.

LINe number 3 char.

BIBliography 65 char.

SEQuence number is the unique 10-digit number which references records of information pertaining to a mineral property as identified by the MILS table in the original relational data base.

TABle is two characters which relate the bibliographic reference to a specific data base table in the original relational data base.

Only general references (e.g., a blank TABle indicates general reference material) and references from the Resource Table (e.g., an entry of R under TABle) were extracted from the original relational data base tables for inclusion in this CD-ROM.

 LINe number (3 characters) contains a unique value (from 001 to 999)for each line of Bibliography relating to a referenced table in the original relational data base.

 BIBliography contains a single 65-character line of reference material source description.