NFDI-MatWerk will focus on the research areas of materials science and materials engineering. The key challenges in these fields are the digital mapping of materials and their process and loading parameters. This process touches core aspects of scientific ways of working starting with scientific exchange, data handling and the resulting technological possibilities. The digital transformation of materials science and materials engineering is an opportunity to promote, structure and optimize this exchange - provided that transparent communication standards are created. This fundamental change is therefore being tackled in a joint effort by the consortium and the specialist community.

Since the Stone Age, our social and economic progress has depended on the mastery of materials. Today, materials science and materials engineering (MatWerk) is an independent discipline whose goal is to characterize materials and study manufacturing processes in order to develop materials with optimized properties and to maximize their durability and recyclability.

For the digital transformation of materials science and materials engineering, a data space, the Digital Materials Environment (DME),  is now being created that can map the complex relationships between different materials data. In addition, services for easy storage, sharing, searching and analysis of data and metadata will be made available. The new data space should also have the lowest possible technological barriers for users. To this end, NFDI-MatWerk aims to provide a materials ontology that enables easy sharing of data and complex searches and analysis across distributed, decentralized data sources via a graph database infrastructure. The seamless integration of decentralized data and metadata, experimental and numerical workflows, and the materials ontology allows for maximum interoperability and reproducibility of research data processing. In addition to tasks in other task areas, the education and training of researchers, technical experts and students by partners of the consortium will play an important role.

The consortium

The consortium consists of renowned research institutions, including 11 applicants and a further 15 associated institutions. It is coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM.

FIZ Karlsruhe@ NFDI-MatWerk

Within the framework of the task area "Ontologies for Materials Sciences" (TA-OMS), FIZ Karlsruhe is playing a leading role in the development of a standardized materials ontology, on the basis of which a knowledge graph will be implemented that will make research data from the materials sciences, characterized by their metadata, discoverable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.