MDI Provider Integration and Interoperability Working Group

Contact: zachary.trautt@nist.gov

Chairpersons

• Santanu Chaudhuri (Argonne National Laboratory)
• Marcus D. Hanwell (Brookhaven National Laboratory)
• Matthew D. Jacobsen (Air Force Research Laboratory)
• Klara Nahrstedt (University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign)
• Suhas Somnath (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
• Zachary T. Trautt (National Institute of Standards and Technology)

Motivation

Traditional meeting/conference venues for materials science and engineering tend to have (at most) a single session focused on materials data and informatics. Furthermore, these sessions also tend to emphasize the application and reuse of materials data rather than software development and system integration concerns of materials data infrastructure (MDI). The purpose of the MDI Provider Integration and Interoperability WG is to provide a dedicated venue for MDI providers (e.g., software developers, data engineers, etc.) to coordinate MDI development activities and build consensus around the adoption of the FAIR Data Principles.

Work Plan

• Host Monthly virtual meetings with the proposed agenda:
  • 20 minute demonstration/presentation by relevant project or MDI provider (emphasis on topics relevant to other MDI providers)
  • Announcements (e.g., other relevant meetings/workshops)
  • Old/New business (e.g., planning specific MDI events)
• Host specific, task-oriented, events (e.g., hackathons, workshops, etc.) as identified and planned during regular business during monthly meetings. Initial brainstorm ideas for specific event topics identified by chairpersons include:
  • Interoperability across data repositories, data management tools, and data itself
  • Data transformation and extraction as a service
  • Automated data ingest from instruments and beamlines (specifically high-volume/high-velocity data generators)
  • Containerization best practices
  • Development of MDI Reference Architecture(s)
  • FAIR Implementation Profile
  • Handbook/playbook on data/software best practice
• Coordinate our activities with other MaRDA working groups and applicable efforts hosted by RDA, CODATA, GO FAIR, etc. E.g.:
  • Work directly with MaRDA WG2 on fostering the development of a comprehensive listing of available infrastructure and gap analysis

Goals and Expected Impact

• Coordinate MDI development activities. E.g.:
  • Share lessons learned among MDI projects
  • Develop shared solutions/technology among MDI projects
  • Build bridges across materials and manufacturing domains with eventual development of standards between hardware, IoT, edge devices, and data stores
  • Enable strategic and tactical planning for the demonstration and implementation of FAIR Data Approaches for the full “cradle-to-grave” research data lifecycle
  • Support advocacy for open technology and data, including the use of best practice methods and protocols, in order to encourage the seamless exchange of research products
• Build consensus within the MDI community E.g.:
  • Application of FAIR Principles to MDI tools/standards/data/etc.
  • MDI sustainability strategies
  • Best practices and common vocabulary for technical approaches in both software and data
  • Experimental and simulation data interchange and mining mechanisms to enable use in machine learning tools

Deliverables

• Meeting minutes and other documents shared during monthly calls
• Planning/summary documents from task-oriented events and other documents created during task-oriented events
• Any outputs developed during task-oriented events (e.g., new software code repositories)