Until recently, scientists didn’t have the necessary modelling and visualization tools to capitalize on these giant stockpiles of information.

Network analysis offers new insight into minerals, just as complex data sets offer important understanding of social media connections, city traffic patterns, and metabolic pathways, to name a few examples.

“Big data is a big thing,” says Dr. Hazen. “You hear about it in all kinds of fields — medicine, commerce; even the US National Security Agency uses it to analyze phone records — but until recently no one had applied big data methods to mineralogy and petrology.”

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