Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner Great Lakes – Northern Forest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

US Geological Survey is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU Partner for research and development assistance in text and data mining to support critical minerals assessment.

Objectives include:

Participate in a partnership with the USGS, including other partners that may be engaged, in an initial pilot effort that will build on established methods and techniques for processing literature in text and data mining applications to technical and government reports.

Data Mining from NI 43-101 Technical Reports and other Government Reporting Artifacts

Develop process for ingesting publicly available and proprietary technical reports from a USGS repository location into appropriate technical frameworks within the university research and development environment.

Apply standard algorithms and processes for data extraction from texts to include methods for tables, figures, equations, and other elements.

Apply and test efficacy of existing algorithms for identifying key signals in texts having to do with identifying geospatial extent, geographic features of interest, geologic setting, and other details.

Research and development enhancements to existing geoscience-specific data mining algorithms.

Research and develop new geoscience-specific algorithms needed to identify key properties and variables used in minerals assessment and related practices.

Enhance existing methods and develop new practices as necessary to ensure a clear provenance trace from extracted, analysis-ready data to underlying source material and all processing in between.

Provide software, data, and knowledge products from pilot work focused on specific classes of documents sufficient to leverage the techniques for additional cases and different types of materials.