19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Interoperability

Materials Digital Library: Exploring Benefits and Obstacles to Widespread Adoption of MatML

L.M. Bartolo (lbartolo@kent.edu), C.S. Lowe, A.C. Powell IV, D.R. Sadoway, J.Vieyra, K. Stemen
Materials Informatics Research Lab, College of Arts and Sciences, Kent State University, USA

The Materials Digital Library (MatDL), as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program, investigates research issues associated with the delivery of materials science information for use by academe, government, and industry. Some project goals include: building a collection of quality materials science resources, augmenting the educational experience for materials science and engineering students, and exploring the role that scientific markup languages, such as Materials Property Data Markup Language (MatML), can play in digital libraries and the materials community.

Scientific markup languages are one of the critical underpinnings of the Semantic Web. MatML is an extensible markup language developed for the management and exchange of materials information. Specifically, MatML addresses interpretation and interoperability problems associated with the exchange of materials property data via the World Wide Web. A pilot project provides a practical example of using MatML to supply materials property data to a web-based application program. Property data is marked up with MatML and parsed for use by the application.  Strategies under investigation for accessing the data include using: 1) a relational database as an intermediary between MatML and the application program, 2) MatML directly as a data format, and 3) a native XML database.

Materials science and engineering students enrolled in the "Transport Phenomena in Materials Engineering" course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) use the program to generate graphs comparing selected physical properties across various materials. Students enrolled in a second MSE class at MIT, "Introduction to Solid State Chemistry",  utilize the program to make comparisons based on chemical composition data.  The addition of these exercises to existing materials science and engineering curricula enhances the educational experience by providing access to real data, allowing students to generate the kind of results that professional materials scientists might use to make decisions regarding material design.

The intent of this pilot is to explore benefits and obstacles relating to widespread adoption of MatML in academe, government, and industry by: 1) tagging materials property data with MatML, 2) parsing MatML files, 3) testing strategies for accessing MatML encoded data, and 4) investigating educational impact of using scientific markup languages with web-based applications for e-learning.