Mars Target Encyclopedia

About this technology

Overview

The Mars Target Encyclopedia (MTE) contains compositional information about Mars surface targets. The information was automatically extracted from scientific publications. Users can search for all targets that contain an element (e.g., "calcium") or mineral (e.g., "hematite") and see a map view of their spatial locations. They can also look up information about a specific target of interest (e.g., "Dillinger") to browse previous findings about its composition. All information in the MTE is linked to the source publication from which it was extracted, so users can easily browse the full context in the original document.We used two existing technologies to extract information for the MTE. First, we trained a Named Entity Recognition classifier using Stanford's CoreNLP system. We hand-labeled 63 documents from the 2015 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) to indicate Elements, Minerals, and Targets. We trained a classifier on this data set and evaluated it on a set of 30 hand-labeled documents from LPSC 2016, achieving a performance of 0.83.