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SCIENTIFIC DATA

Integrating materials databases

Nature Reviews Materials volume 6, page 967 (2021)Cite this article

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Materials databases, such as the Materials Project, Crystallography Open Database or Materials Cloud, make experimental and computational materials data freely available to the community and have become a key resource for materials scientists. However, retrieving and comparing data from different databases remains challenging, as queries vary in format and strategy for each database. Now, writing in Scientific Data, the Open Databases Integration for Materials Design (OPTIMADE) consortium has designed a universal application programming interface (API) to make materials databases interoperable.

The OPTIMADE consortium has now designed an API that can be implemented across a broad range of materials databases. “To filter materials databases, the user typically submits a query to that database via a URL,” explains Matthew Evans, co-author of the study. “To enable filtering of multiple databases in a standardized form, we have created an API specification that databases can adopt so that the same query will work across different databases.” Therefore, the same URL path, across different OPTIMADE API implementations, allows uniform access to the underlying databases. Both human-readable and machine-readable versions of the OPTIMADE API specification are available online.

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Original article

  • Andersen, C. W. et al. OPTIMADE, an API for exchanging materials data. Sci. Data 8, 217 (2021)

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  1. Nature Reviews Materials http://www.nature.com/natrevmats/

    Christine Horejs

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  1. Christine Horejs
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Correspondence to Christine Horejs.

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Horejs, C. Integrating materials databases. Nat Rev Mater 6, 967 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-021-00371-3

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