| Abstract Scope |
With the advent of the materials genome initiative (MGI) in the United States and a similar focus on materials data around the world, numerous materials data resources and associated vocabularies, tools, and repositories have been developed. While the majority of these systems focus on slices of computational data with an emphasis on crystallographic materials, platforms for organic materials and their composites, especially those incorporating experimental data, have been quite limited. We will discuss the unique aspects of tackling data assembly and informatics associated with experimental organic materials data, with focus on our experiences creating an open-source data resource, NanoMine, part of MaterialsMine. Our goal has been to curate, annotate and store widely varying experimental data on polymer nanocomposites (polymers doped with nanofiller) and providing access to characterization and analysis tools with the long-term objective of promoting facile nanocomposite design. The challenges and promises associated with data curation, ontology and vocabulary development, standardization and interoperability, and data visualization and analysis tools will be discussed. Several case studies will be presented, including use of natural language processing for archival data curation, coupling of experimental and computational data for materials design, and development of machine learning tools for rapid property screening and inference. Overall, we focus on the promise of this new approach to tackle materials design principles for the complex, high dimensional problems inherent in the multi-phase polymer space. |