CompuServe Messages

Your database is most valuable, it's ripe for improvement with a friendly interface and a good database searching engine, customized for the study of minerals. I might be able to help with the color question, in terms of programming. There's a technique I use in my programs called the "color naming system." In programmer's terms, it's a subroutine that can take a limited set of color descriptions "light yellow-green" and turn it into an RGB value, suitable for a computer screen. It also perform the reverse, mapping colors to English color names with great specificity. Given the wide range of actual colors of a specific mineral, and the latitude we must extend to humans when it comes to color naming, I'd say your database needs to be quite flexible when it comes to color handling. I can imagine an interface that would let the user set a color on-screen, with sliders, and then the program would use the resulting RGB value to find matches within a certain range of that value.