Collecting, sharing, and visualising harmonised data on European raw materials occurrences and mines – success or failure?

Easy web access to useful and reliable mineral information for the whole of Europe is the main objective of the extension of the M4EU base in the GeoERA project Mineral Intelligence for Europe (MINTELL4EU). The foundation has been laid by previous projects such as Minerals4EU, ProSUM, SCRREEN, EuRare, ORAMA, and new ones have been added in collaboration with ongoing projects such as RESEERVE. Europe's geological survey organizations play an important role as they are the main contributors in collecting and storing information on raw materials at national or regional level and making it available to end users as policy and decision makers. The information includes, among other things, the location of individual mineral deposits (occurrences) and mines, etc., which are stored in a central database, now called MIN4EU. However, national datasets are typically organized differently from country to country, based on different geological traditions and legal obligations. Our goal was to maximize harmonization, achieve higher quality of collected data, achieve higher interoperability by following the INSPIRE directive, include data from a larger number of countries, and visualize these data on the European Geological Data Infrastructure (EGDI) in a harmonized, sometimes targeted way. The methods for collecting (harvesting) data and several error detections tools to help data providers check the status of their national data reported in MIN4EU DB will be discussed. Examples of successful and less successful harmonized visualizations, data sharing with other information systems and future challenges are also presented.