2018-01-02

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 .