Materials Data Facility - Data services to advance materials science research

In collaboration between Globus [1] and the NCSA at UIUC, we built a prototype Materials Data Facility (MDF) service to advance materials science research. Based on lessons learned from direct interactions with researchers during this process, we found that such a service should promote open data sharing, simplify data publication and curation workflows, encourage data reuse, and provide powerful data discovery interfaces. Towards that end, we are developing services that will allow individual researchers and institutions to 1) enable publication of large research datasets with flexible policies; 2) grant the ability to publish data directly from local storage, institutional data stores, or from cloud storage, without third-party publishers; 3) build extensible domain-specific metadata; 4) develop publication workflows and automate experiment workflows; and 5) access a discovery model that allows researchers to search, interrogate, and build upon existing published data.