01/11/2006
LINKS
http://navdat.geo.ku.edu/
http://navdat.geongrid.org/
http://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~caudill/navdat/php/
Use for data entry
ANIMATIONS
WHAT IS NAVDAT?
Navdat is "The Western North American Volcanic and Intrusive Rock Database". It is a relational database that serves as a web-accessible electronic database repository for age, chemical, and isotopic data spanning Late Cretaceous to Holocene time. Recent work has been focused on expanding the database to include the Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks. My focus has been primarily on entering data from Cretaceous and older rocks from the Sierra Nevada Batholith.
WHY BUILD NAVDAT?
Over the past thirty years, geochemical, geochronological, and geospatial analysis of igneous rocks has produced vast amounts of data. NAVDAT was designed to save the researcher community countless hours of data compilation, by providing a unified high-quality database. The substantial cost in money and time required for geochemical studies has driven the creation of this repository to facilitate collaborative research and data discovery. Igneous geochemical research can now be done at a larger scale without the added burden of searching for and compiling published data. In addition, data contributed to and compiled in NAVDAT should be easy to access in the future, greatly enhancing the value and visibility of geochemical studies.
We have designed the NAVDAT
interface to give users a wide flexibility in constructing searches. Simple
searches based on age and location are easy to implement. Expert users and
researchers often want more detailed information. For that reasons, NAVDAT is a
relational database containing a deep level of metadata. (This is not true for
the allied databases; these were taken from sources in "as is"
formats.) A search can be constructed to select data on samples from a
particular state or province (e.g., show me samples in California and Alberta).
Alternatively, a search can be put together to select samples with SiO2 values
between 45% and 55% from Colorado that were analyzed for rare earth elements by
ICPMS. Of course, this level of metadata is only possible for samples we have
put into the NAVDAT part of the database. Other contributions (PETROS) are much
more limited in the level of metadata searchability.