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Materiom Data Commons

Materiom is a materials science company building an open database of sustainable bio-materials, their recipes and their physical properties. Cottage Labs has helped them build their search and data visualisation enviornment for researchers

Challenge

Materiom had a growing dataset of materials from research publications and from user submissions, and they wanted a way for end users to find materials by their properties, and to comparatively graph them against each other. This would enable scientists to find materials which had suitable properties for their needs, and to select the most appropriate ones by comparison to other matierials and to their non-renewable alternatives.

Solution

We build a data indexing pipeline to run from Materiom's primary database into a custom built search and visualisation environment. This allowed us to provide novel searching tools (such as searching by material property), and to combine with a researcher-focused comparison view using contour plots. Reseachers would select a number of materials from search, and then switch to comparison view, where multiple properties can be plotted against each other. Behind the scenes this involved a lot of data normalisation to ensure coherent and comparable results.

Success

Materiom successfully launched their MVP with support from Cottage Labs, and are growing their database with input from users and Machine Learning algorithms reviewing the materials science literature. We are now looking together at future work to make the data even more valuable to researchers.