Material Commons Site Overview

The Materials Commons consists of a web application and an API, Application Programmer Interface. The web application and the API are supported by a 'backend' database.

The Materials Commons database is a repository of private, shared, and/or published Materials Science projects, each consisting of a series of recorded experiments in which several items are captured as data and meta-data: details of the samples used in the experiments, details of the processes and measurements applied to the samples, the results of the transformations and measurements, annotations, and links to relevant support material: publications, reviews, contributors, institutions, and funding.

Published Data

The material commons web application consists of a project-support part which under is access control, and a 'public facing' publication part. On entry to the Materials Commons site you will first see the home page for the public data (e.g. publication) part. What you are viewing here are datasets curated for publication by a scientist or technicians using the Materials Commons project-support part of the application. In this public data area, the general public can review the abstracts, authors, relevant publications and funding of a published dataset. In addition, the researcher-selected data can be previewed. Then, with a Materials Commons login, greater details of the public dataset are available, including the ability to download the published project artifacts. Below a screenshot of the main page of the Materials Commons public data site:

Projects

Once a user of the system is logged in, then the project-support part of the web application is available. This is the user interface for working in Materials Commons. In the projects area you can define projects and experiments, populate them with data and meta-data, create workflow diagrams of experimental processes, and annotate the experiment, its samples, process steps, and workflow . Since logins are required for access to this part of the site you must register, but registration is straight forward; see the login help page. Below is a screenshot of projects list page (see help on projects page ):

PRISMS

The materials-commons web application, database, and API are part of a larger project: PRISMS. See the PRISMS project site for more details.

Figure from: The Materials Commons: A Collaborative Platform and Information Repository… by B Puchala, G Tarcea, EA Marquis, M Hedstrom, HV Hagadish, And JE Allison; JOM (2016) 68: 2035. doi:10.1007/s11837-016-1998-7