This publication comprises a database of
World tin and tungsten deposits compiled by the Working Group on Tin and Tungsten,
International Association on the Genesis of Ore Deposits (IAGOD). The majority
of these deposits are associated with felsic to intermediate intrusive igneous
rocks. Variations of this class include mineralized stockworks and veins,
greisens, skarns, and replacement deposits in predominantly carbonate-rich
sedimentary rocks. Significant tin and
tungsten deposits also occur as placer deposits
and as volcanic-associated deposits. This database has been compiled primarily
from published literature and, in the absence of published references, from the
personal knowledge of the compilers. Resource estimates 1 captured in this
database are historical and do not conform to Securities Commission National
Instrument 43-101 standards, regardless of how they have beed classified.
The database was first proposed in 1999,
and was completed in 2007 after the termination of the World Minerals Geoscience
Database Project (WMGDP: 1998-2004), a project sponsored jointly by the
Geological Survey of Canada and exploration companies 2 . The first version
appeared on Natural Resources Canada’s Geoscience Data Repository web portal World
and Canadian Minerals Deposits in 2007 and was updated in 2008. Resource
estimates for a few deposits in northern Canada were updated in 2014, but
otherwise the data remain current to early 2008. Index level excerpts of the database
were used for the map: World distribution of tin and tungsten deposits
(Sinclair et al., 2011). The only access NRCan now provides to World and
Canadian deposit databases are Web Map Services (WMS). They are used by
external web map portals which display them as points with no attribute data as
components of geospatial mashups. The aim of this Open File is to make the full
database and its supporting database management utilities available to those
that can use them, and to provide simple attributed derivative ESRI® Shape and
Google Earth™ files, and folders of deposit and deposit group reports with
index.html files which serve as Tables of Contents.
The database schema used for this database
(Chorlton et al, 2007) was developed for the WMGDP. The web-style Documentation
folder, modified from Laramée (2004), contains a thorough description of the
WMGDP schema and supporting data management interfaces included with it in the
folder GlobalDBSystem321, and can be read using an Internet browser by clicking
on the file default.htm. During the WMGDP, compilers (deposit specialists) and
company sponsors suggested topics to be included in the schema. They also
provided helpful feedback for the functionality of the data management
interfaces. This resulted in incremental updates between releases to company
sponsors. World and Canadian lode gold databases (Gosselin and Dubé ,2005a, b)
were released in schema 3.19, the version used for the final release 3.6 to
company sponsors in 2004. The schema, now at version 3.21, release 3.7, is a
major update of version 3.19, with the addition of extra tables required for
Canada-only deposits for compilations under the Northern Resource Development
and Northern Mineral Resource Development programs.
The GlobalDB System schema (diagram page 6)
includes sets of tables that can be used to describe six entities (things): deposits/occurrences,
deposit groups, mines, production figures, resource figures, and references.
The deposits and deposit groups modules describe locations, deposit type and
subtype, names, country and province, commodities, geological ages, host rocks,
related igneous rocks, mineralization styles, coincident features, radiometric
dates, tectonic settings, shape and dimensions, NTS areas, qualified comments,
links to other databases, geophysical /geochemical signature, sample data, and compilation
stage and progress. The service tables: entities, tabledoc, links, columndoc,
tabpages, and lookup explicitly define the entities, tables, links between
tables, fields, interface tab pages, and the lookup tables, to completely
define the schema. Two additional service tables: dbversion and unitcvsn,
provide the title, version and authors of the current database, and conversion
factors (to metric) for the production and resource figures, respectively. The
service tables, described above, should be consulted before transferring this
data across database management programs and platforms, or rebuilding the data
management applications when the application interfaces supplied with this Open
File can no longer be used because of changes to the Windows® operating system.
Standalone custom Windows® application
interfaces, developed by Robert M. Laramée 3 , enable a user with a 32 bit computer
equipped with the Windows operating system to browse, filter, and obtain output
from this database. They are included in this Open File in the folder
GlobalDBSystem321. All applications require an ADO connection file, or Microsoft®
data link, to each database for which they are to be used, created in the
folder under the same folder that houses the application interfaces 4 . By
convention, WMGDP compilers installed a folder GlobalDBSystem under Program Files
on the local C: drive, but the GlobalDBSystem321 folder and files can be saved
anywhere and no installation is required. Instructions for creating the
mandatory Microsoft data link file are included under “Defining database
aliases” in the Documentation\default.htm and in the standalone file
HowtoADO.rtf.
GShellBrowser allows a user to browse the
database record by record, and offers the same tab page view of the data offered
by the original data entry interface, GShellADO, known in short form as GShell.
The latter only works under the Windows® XP and earlier Windows operating
systems, and has been included in this package for users that still have a Windows
XP computer (disconnected from the Internet because Microsoft no longer
supports it by supplying Security updates), or have an XP emulator installed.
GQueryADO, known as GQuery for short, provides a user the means to filter the
occurrences based on attribute values, to build a template for a custom
spreadsheet and export this spreadsheet or a default summary spreadsheet, and
to create folders of occurrence reports for the full set or subsets of the
deposits in the database. Both GShellBrowser and GQuery work under Windows 7
once the pre-requisite ADO connection file has beencreated.
There are three additional programs in
GlobalDBSystem321: GQ_ADO_XtraTables, Documenter, and GBDSTools. The program
GQ_ADO_XtraTables builds or rebuilds summary tables for the use of GQuery,
which improved performance over an older method of creating these summary
tables on the fly. The program Documenter allows users to examine each table
and field of each category of table (Data, Junction, Lookup, and Service
depending on their roles),which complements the more general web page style
documentation. Finally, GDBSTools provides a database manager with utilities
that can check the internal integrity of the database, time stamp a new release
and export SQL data scripts of the contents of the connected database. These
SQL scripts can be used to populate a new database created with GlobalDBSchema321.sql
in one of many SQL-enabled relational database management systems available
today 5 .