Dorian G. W. Smith

Dr. Dorian G. W. Smith passed away in 2013. His areas of expertise were mineralogy, meteoritics and microanalysis. He developed sophisticated, multi-media mineral databases and software for mineral identification.

Collaborations:

Joint Publications:

More information:

MinIdent – The Mineral Identification Domain Expert

MinIdent is a mineral identification software and data base used in mineralogy. The original Command-line interface (CLI) program was written in FORTRAN and ran on a mainframe computer. It was later ported to a PC. The current version of the MinIdent-Win software has a graphical user interface (GUI) and is available at www.micronex.ca.

MinIdent represents information about minerals in a statistical manner and identifies unknown minerals with a fuzzy-like matching system. Even without a set of mineral samples, MinIdent can construct statistics based on understanding the chemical formula of a mineral.

GemIdent is a derivative of MinIdent.

People: MinIdent was initially developed between 1981 and 1987 by David Pierre Leibovitz and Dorian G. W. Smith.

Related Publications:

Smith, D. G. W. (2003). Member in the News: Dorian Smith and MinIdent. Newsletter of the Mineralogical Association of Canada, 69(April), 19–20.

Smith, D. G. W., Omoumi, H., & Leibovitz, D. P. (1989) The MinIdent database: some recent development. 28th International Geological Congress. Abstracts 3: 138-139

Smith, D. G. W., & Leibovitz, D .P. (1986) MinIdent User’s Manual. A FORTRAN 77 program for mineral identification. Computing Services, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Smith, D. G. W., & Leibovitz, D. P. (1986) MinIdent: A data base for minerals and a computer program for their identification. Canadian Mineralogist. 24(4): 695-708.

Smith, D. G. W., & Leibovitz, D. P. (1984) A computer-based system for identification of minerals on the basis of composition and other properties. 27th International Geological Congress. Extended Abstract, 5: 169.

External Links: