Materials Data Centre is a JISC-funded intitiative to build an infrastructre for materials scientists and engineers to publish their experimental data online.
Motivations: the engineering community invests significantly in generating materials test data. Consideration need only be given to initiatives such as ITER and emerging technologies such as nanomaterials to appreciate the level of investment and the volume of data generated. Well-established procedural testing standards identify exactly what data needs to be recorded, but in the absence of corresponding formats, the data are rarely conserved, and their value diminishes as the material pedigree, test conditions and results become disassociated. Even when conserved, data invariably remain inaccessible to the wider community, which acts to hinder both business and research in the engineering sector. In this context, the MDC is one of a series of complementary initiatives to establish an infrastructure to capture and conserve data in the engineering sciences.
The project website is at
http://www.materialsdatacentre.com.
This project has been superseded by the
Heterogeneous Data Centre project (HDC).