Materials Science: Preceding Research Data Management opens new Horizons
New data infrastructures pave the way to make material data findable, accessible and reusable
For the future of materials research, it is essential to systematically access and sustainably save experimental data and to make it accessible for further utilization. These requirements need to be fulfilled e.g. for the application of artificial intelligence methods. In practice, such a digitalization of research data and their subsequent management pose enormous challenges. Only with well-structured data repositories and carefully selected metadata, developed in collaboration with computer science and informatics, will the flood of data become manageable. HGF researchers of the Materials Systems Engineering (MSE) Program from the Helmholtz Research Field Information, in collaboration with various universities and the Max Planck Society, have described in a perspective article in the Nature journal what such an approach might look like and what new possibilities it opens up. The basis of this “digitalization of materials science” is the FAIRmat consortium, an initiative funded within the framework of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) since the end of 2021.
“In the Research Field Information, the materials sciences find an excellent environment with its methodological and technical digital competence to accelerate a modern expression of materials research with research data management and model-based simulation in close linkage” says Wolfgang Marquardt, coordinator of RF Information.
MSE spokesperson Christof Wöll, one of the co-authors of the Nature study, sees excellent development prospects for his “Materials Systems Engineering” Program in particular as a result of the new horizons for materials research highlighted in the article. This optimism is based on collaboration with the other two programs in the Research Field Information. Accompanied by the activities of the “Natural, Artificial and Cognitive Information Processing” (NACIP) Program, the collaboration with computer scientists in the “Engineering Digital Futures” (EDF) Program in particular offers excellent conditions for tackling the problems expected in connection with the digitization of materials research. The near-term goal is to link research data from experimental studies and computer simulations after they have been archived, to curate them, and then to analyze them using artificial intelligence methods, for example. The future vision of a synthesis of previously unknown, novel materials and material systems is thus taking shape.
The original publication can be found at:
Matthias Scheffler, Martin Aeschlimann, Martin Albrecht, Tristan Bereau, Hans-Joachim Bungartz, Claudia Felser, Mark Greiner, Axel Groß, Christoph T. Koch, Kurt Kremer, Wolfgang E. Nagel, Markus Scheidgen, Christof Wöll & Claudia Draxl, FAIR data enabling new horizons for materials research, Nature (27. April 2022), DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04501-x
Localization in the Helmholtz Research Field Information:
Helmholtz Research Field Information, Program 3: Materials Systems Engineering, Topic 3: Adaptive and Bioinstructive Materials Systems
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Christof Wöll
Director Institute of Functional Interfaces (IFG)
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Phone: +49 721-608-2-3934
E-Mail: christof.woell@kit.edu
