Sharing data in materials science

摘要

The US Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), launched in June 2011 by President Barack Obama, aims to halve the time and cost of developing advanced materials for applications such as energy, transport and security. Two years in, hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in academic, industry and federal-agency projects. Sharing data and developing computational tools are crucial to the MGI's success. Advanced materials have complex physical and chemical properties that can be manipulated for different applications, and these can change during synthesis, manufacture and use. The tracking of these properties is a formidable task, and the MGI includes efforts to standardize terminology, data-archiving formats and reporting guidelines.