Dear colleagues in the MaterialDigital community,
Welcome to our third newsletter of the year!
We were delighted to meet many of our community members again in person at the General Assembly and to be able to exchange ideas directly. In this newsletter, we will give you an insight into the highlights of the General Assembly and report on the latest developments and activities within the MaterialDigital initiative.
We hope you enjoy reading it!
This year's General Assembly of the MaterialDigital initiative was a great success. Over 140 participants from industry, research, the initiative's projects and representatives of the BMBF and VDI-TZ came together at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing for an intensive exchange of ideas. The strong presence of the projects was particularly pleasing: The 11 currently funded projects from the second MaterialDigital funding phase took the opportunity to network with 10 of the 13 projects from the first funding phase (MaterialDigital1), deepen existing contacts and initiate new collaborations (Fig.1).
A highlight of the first day was the industry session, in which representatives from industry presented their digitalization strategies in short pitches. These insights showed how companies are implementing digitalization in materials science and what challenges and opportunities are associated with it.
In the afternoon, the poster session took place, where the projects of MaterialDigital1 and MaterialDigital2 presented their work. The posters are linked for logged-in users on the respective project pages and in the download area of our website. In addition, the projects of the second funding phase gave short presentations on the second day, which are also accessible.
The first evening ended with a joint dinner, which offered the opportunity to continue the talks and discussions of the day in a relaxed atmosphere.
The second day began with presentations on the technical PMD demonstrators (also available in the download area). A very important part of the General Assembly were the workshops of the main working areas Semantic Interoperability, Workflows and Architecture & IT Infrastructure. Detailed information on these workshops can be found in the following sections of the newsletter, in which we discuss the individual technical working groups.
One week after the MaterialDigital General Assembly, the MSE Congress 2024 in Darmstadt offered the opportunity to meet many colleagues from the initiative again. The initiative was represented with a booth where conference participants were able to find out about MaterialDigital's activities and talk to members of the initiative. The booth also served as a meeting point for the MaterialDigital community to deepen technical discussions after the talks. There was also an intensive exchange with the NFDI-MatWerk initiative, which further promoted the close cooperation between the two projects.
The topic Digital Transformation featured numerous interesting presentations from the MaterialDigital initiative itself as well as from other projects and institutions. We were very pleased that the topic, which was co-organized by the MaterialDigital platform, met with so much interest. We really enjoyed the discussions during the poster session and between the presentations. Bernd Bayerlein received the poster prize in the topic Digital Transformation. You can find the poster in our download area for the MSE.
Initial planning for next year's EUROMAT is already underway, so stay tuned and make a note of the date (September 14-18, 2025 in Granada, Spain).
As always, you can find further dates and events on our website.
Following the successful face-to-face meetings in September, we are pleased to continue our monthly community meetings in digital format. As already reported in the last newsletter, the meetings will feature exciting short presentations from the MaterialDigital2 projects until the end of December.
In the last meetings, the project teams DaMaStE, AnAttAl, DiMoGraph, DigitalModelling, DiMad and InSuKa have already introduced themselves with profiles. These and further information on the projects can be found on the respective project pages.
The community meetings offer space for general exchange on important dates, activities and plans, both for the MaterialDigital platform and the individual projects. We cordially invite all project partners and interested parties to take part in the meetings. We look forward to seeing you!
The topic of workflows was a central item on the program at this year's General Assembly. Christoph Kirchlechner from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) dedicated the event's topical talk to the processing of data in experimental workflows. In the workflow workshop on the second day, Jan Janssen and Leopold Talirz demonstrated the use of large language models for the execution of workflows. This was complemented by a hands-on session that gave participants the opportunity to directly test the potential of LLMs in this context. Many of the MaterialDigital projects present showed a fundamental interest in the use of LLMs, although only a few are already pursuing concrete plans for the current funding phase. In addition, the architecture workshop discussed the workflow frameworks SimStack and pyiron, during which various application scenarios in SimStack and the integration of software tools in pyiron were demonstrated.
The day after the General Assembly, a workflow hackathon was held to discuss the interactions between the different application fields of workflows, such as simulation and experimentation, for knowledge generation. It was discussed how these interactions can be better considered in the organization of the working groups to further promote the integration between workflows and ontologies as well as the work of the projects and the platform. In addition, plans were developed to improve the interchangeability of workflows between the SimStack and pyiron platforms.
In addition to the General Assembly, the exchange on workflow solutions also took place at the MSE in Darmstadt, where several contributions from the MaterialDigital initiative provided insights into the latest developments. Among others, Markus Apel (DiMad) presented a simulation workflow for wire-based additive manufacturing that combines thermal and microstructural simulations and should enable automated parameter studies in the future. Simon Bekemeier presented DiProMag's pipeline for the automation of data acquisition and simulation for magnetocaloric materials. Tilmann Hickel presented pyiron's current developments using the example of a workflow for the simulation of cold rolling processes from the StahlDigital project. Miriam Eisenbart explained how the KupferDigital project is digitizing a high throughput approach to alloy development and using CALPHAD calculations to optimize copper alloys. Jörg Schaarschmidt emphasized the importance of the MaterialDigital platform's Workflow Store, which serves as a platform for disseminating and linking scientific workflows.
We are delighted that our colleagues from the initiative are dealing with the challenges in workflow development in such a diverse and innovative way and are continuously driving them forward. Special thanks go to the speakers and organizers of the various lectures, symposia and workshops, who provided us with valuable insights and inspiration.
During the General Assembly, the workshop of the main working area Semantic Interoperability was well attended and enjoyed intensive discussions. The presentation by Lars Vogt (TIB, Insuka) on the topics of “Semantic interoperability, FAIR 2.0, FAIR services” was particularly inspiring, providing participants with valuable insights into fundamental considerations and the resulting work.
The PMD Core Team “Semantic Interoperability” was also strongly represented at the MSE in Darmstadt with four presentations. Bernd Bayerlein spoke about the digital transformation in materials science with insights from the PMD project. Henk Birkholz highlighted the further development of the PMD Core Ontology (PMDco) towards the ISO/IEC 21838-2:2021 Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). Markus Schilling showed how semantic data integration, electronic lab notebooks and knowledge graphs can simplify everyday laboratory work in digitized materials science. Kostiantyn Hubaiev presented a semantically enriched ontology for thermodynamic alloys. The MaterialDigital projects were also represented with many contributions.
Posters were also presented: The poster “Semantic integration of diverse data in materials science: Assessing Orowan strengthening” by Bernd Bayerlein, Markus Schilling, Philipp von Hartrott and Jörg Waitelonis was awarded as the best poster of the Symposium D: Digital Transformation.
An important event in November is the hackathon for the collaborative further development of the PMDco. Participants can bring along their project-specific modeling examples to test, improve or expand them. Workflows for integrating data into the knowledge graph will also be discussed and generic modeling patterns for materials science and engineering will be identified to enable systematic reuse. Advanced topics such as SHACL shapes, constraints, OWL axioms and the curation process in the community are also addressed.
The PMD architecture and infrastructure group also offered a workshop at this year's General Assembly. Interested participants from the projects had the opportunity to gain a detailed insight into the PMD demonstrator and thus into the interaction of the various PMD architecture components as part of a live demonstration. In addition, a new service was presented in the form of a practical introduction to the PMD data portal. In the subsequent discussion round, the main focus was on data transformation - i.e. the process of transitioning from a “native” data description to a semantically standardized annotation - and the role of distributed resources such as high-performance computers. It became clear that there are challenges to overcome in both areas. The process of data transformation is usually very specific to the respective data set. Generalizations are therefore only possible if there is an intensive exchange between the projects and the PMD core groups. In most cases, access to IT resources is restricted by strict specifications of the respective data center. Shared use of such distributed resources is only possible if secure authentication mechanisms are established and even then will only be granted on a project basis.
There are always exciting new scientific contributions in our initiative. We are currently pleased about publications from the KupferDigital project:
If you also have publications from your project, please send them to us at community@material-digital.de. We will share them with the community and make sure that your research is visible.
Further publications have also appeared as part of the special issue prepared by the MaterialDigital initiative in the journal Advanced Engineering Materials.
Automated Workflow for Phase-Field Simulations: Unveiling the Impact of Heat-Treatment Parameters on Bainitic Microstructure in Steel from the MaterialDigital1 project iBain
Digital Methods for the Fatigue Assessment of Engineering Steels from the Fraunhofer IWM project UrWerk
Performance Evaluation of Upper-Level Ontologies in Developing Materials Science Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs from the MaterialDigital1 project KupferDigital
The special issue will be printed in spring and we will inform you about it in the first newsletter of the new year. We are already very much looking forward to the publication of the special issue and would like to thank all authors once again. You can view the list of all contributions already published here.
We would like to inform you about the start of the second call for proposals as part of the MaterialNeutral programme. The “MaterialNeutral” call by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is part of the Material Hub Initiative and aims to promote material innovations to overcome social and industrial challenges. The main objectives are to increase resource and material efficiency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce dependence on raw materials and strengthen Germany's technological sovereignty.
The call for proposals focuses on reducing the consumption of raw materials, using secondary raw materials, substituting conventional raw materials with sustainable alternatives and a risk-based approach to materials development.
The call focuses on reducing the consumption of raw materials, the use of secondary raw materials, the substitution of conventional raw materials with sustainable alternatives and a risk-based approach to materials development.
As part of the MaterialNeutral2 funding, the MaterialDigital platform offers technical support and insights into concepts and methods of digitalized materials research that can be adapted to suit individual requirements.
The call for proposals runs until January 17, 2025, until then interested projects can submit their outlines.
Congratulations to NFDI-MatWerk on the redesigned website. It has been online since September 5th. The new Solutions Area offers an improved user experience and presents solutions for research data management in materials science projects for each project phase and for different levels of expertise. The website also presents the vision and goals of NFDI-MatWerk in a clear and structured way so that all interested materials scientists can quickly understand how they can benefit from the NFDI-MatWerk solutions.
An important goal of the NFDI-MatWerk initiative is to make the developed solutions for research data management accessible to a broader community. A newly founded rollout working group is conducting interviews with users of the project partners as a first step to ensure that the solutions are useful and user-friendly. In addition, support will be expanded and teaching materials developed to support the entire MSE community in digital research data management. Visit the NFDI-Matwerk website regularly for further updates!
Together with the NFDI-MatWerk initiative, the MaterialDigital platform is working on coordinated community surveys. NFDI-MatWerk submitted a detailed interim report on its activities to the DFG in September 2024. This will be published shortly after an evaluation phase and will then also be linked in this newsletter.
Thank you very much for your interest in our newsletter!
We wish you a wonderful fall and look forward to sending you our next newsletter as a year-end wrap-up just before Christmas.
Until then, stay in touch with us: Follow us on LinkedIn and use our website to stay up to date.
If you have any questions, we are always available at info@material-digital.de or via our direct contacts.
The PMD team
