European initiative to share advanced materials resources
MaterialsCommons will create a unified, accessible entry point to Europe’s materials data and digital tools.
The project will connect and integrate existing platforms and initiatives, such as Materials Cloud, NOMAD, MaterialDigital, CAPeX, and OPTIMADE.
MaterialsCommons is a consortium of 26 academic partners, 21 associated partners, and 12 associated collaborators. The project is coordinated by Fraunhofer-Institut für Werkstoffmechanik, Germany.
The project aims to make materials innovation smarter and significantly faster by improving data standards, access to high-quality data and connected digital workflows that link experiments, simulations and AI tools. An engineer developing a new steel component today may be relying on limited data and need to carry out extensive testing. MaterialsCommons will provide access to richer datasets and advanced digital tools that help predict material properties, which will enable engineers to design and validate better solutions much faster.
MaterialsCommons is reported to be designed to deliver practical benefits for industry. The industrial partners are expected to ensure that tools, data services and digital infrastructure developed address real-world challenges and can be adopted quickly. The project will also support Digital Product Passports with interoperable and traceable data across value chains.
MaterialsCommons’ developments will focus on three areas to accelerate materials development:
- Building a semantic foundation with common taxonomies, metadata standards, and ontologies that can be readily used via shared schemas.
- Simplified access to a wide range of materials science data to enable better informed decisions at an early stage of development.
- More efficient, automated, interconnected and interoperable workflows, for experiments and simulations.
