Kadi4mat: A research data infrastructure for materials science

Abstract

The concepts and current developments of a research data infrastructure for materials science are presented, extending and combining the features of an electronic lab notebook and a repository. The objective of this infrastructure is to incorporate the possibility of structured data storage and data exchange with documented and reproducible data analysis and visualization, which finally leads to the publication of the data. This way, researchers can be supported throughout the entire research process. The software is being developed as a web-based and desktop-based system, offering both a graphical user interface and a programmatic interface. The focus of the development is on the integration of technologies and systems based on both established as well as new concepts. Due to the heterogeneous nature of materials science data, the current features are kept mostly generic, and the structuring of the data is largely left to the users. As a result, an extension of the research data infrastructure to other disciplines is possible in the future. The source code of the project is publicly available under a permissive Apache 2.0 license.