CIF21 DIBBs: PD: Ontology-Enabled Polymer Nanocomposite Open Community Data Resource

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

The project develops an open access data resource for the polymer nanocomposites community, facilitating faster nanocomposite design and insertion into advanced applications. The capability would support three major types of users: researchers interested in comparing their results in detail to other work; researchers exploring, discovering, and quantifying fundamental scientific principles that govern processing-structure-property (p-s-p) relationships; and materials designers interested in using nanocomposites for advanced applications. The resource would accelerate the comparison, exploration, and design of polymer nancomposite materials, for applications ranging from energy to healthcare. The goal is to create an open access, easy to use, persistent, flexible data resource for the polymer nanocomposites community that is scalable and will enable improved understanding of p-s-p relationships and design of commercially relevant polymer nanocomposites. The resource builds upon earlier work using the Material Data Curator System (MDCS) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and a prototype (NanoMine) developed through the NSF Division of Materials Research. A robust ontology will be integrated with an expanded version of the NanoMine prototype to create an open linked data community resource to support organization, integration, mining, and analysis services. Improved data analytics tools are integrated into NanoMine for quantitative image analysis, microstructure reconstruction, knowledge discovery, and materials design recommendation. A set of standards provide quality metrics for the data; these metrics will be integrated into the ontology and used to validate data at the time of data ingest. The project also leverages open source visualization tools and provides semantically enhanced browsing and visualization capabilities to aid users in discovery of new relationships. This award by the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Division is jointly supported by the NSF Engineering Directorate (Division of Civil, Mechanical & Manufacturing Innovation), and the NSF Directorate for Mathematical & Physical Sciences (Division of Materials Research).