I recently wanted to transfer the USGS mines data – Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) to my handheld Garmin GPSMap 60CSx. However I found it quite difficult to take the output from the MRDS webpage and parse it into a format easy to load via the Garmin POILoader.
Since both the datasets could be formatted as csv (comma separated values), you would assume this should be fairly easy….
After trying many other pre-canned solutions and versions of unix tools to try to process the files, I just decided the best thing would be to write an app to do the work for me.
Thus introducing MRDS-2-POI!!
This takes the output from the MRDS (in CSV) and processes the data allowing a lot of user selection into a format the Garmin POILoader can read.
Download some POI files I have created Below!
Here are some POI’s I have created already with the above tool. Included are the original MRDS data, and the POI file named in the format STATEABBREV_MINES.csv, for example AZ_MINES.csv for the Arizona mines data. The format I chose for the comment field is:
| Site characteristics | ||
|---|---|---|
| commod1 | Primary commodities present, a comma-separated list. Commodity qualifiers follow each commodity, delimited by a hyphen. | |
| commod2 | Secondary commodities present, a comma-separated list. Commodity qualifiers follow each commodity, delimited by a hyphen. | |
| dev_stat | Status of development of the resource or operation. | |
| ore | Name of the ore mineral or material found in this deposit. | |
| gangue | Name of the gangue mineral or material found in this deposit. | |
| other_matl | Name of other minerals or materials found in this deposit. | |
| hrock_type | Controlled term(s) indicating the type of host rocks, taken from Lithclass 6.2 | |
| yr_fst_prd | Year of first production at the site. May be modified by YFP_BA. | |
| yr_lst_prd | Year of last production at the site. May be modified by YLP_BA. | |
| disc_yr | Year the site was discovered. The value of DY_BA may modify the meaning of this value. | |
