About us
The Open Databases Integration for Materials Design (OPTIMADE) consortium aims to make materials databases interoperable by developing a specification for a common REST API.
We have released version 1 of the OPTIMADE specification, with several databases already providing implementations. A full list is available on the OPTIMADE providers dashboard.
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Motivation
Designing new materials suitable for specific applications is a long, complex, and costly process. Researchers think of new ideas based on intuition and experience. Their synthesis and evaluation require a tremendous amount of trial and error. In the last few years, there has been a major game change in materials design. Thanks to the exponential growth of computer power and the development of robust first-principles electronic structure codes, it has become possible to perform large sets of calculations automatically. This is the burgeoning area of high-throughput ab initio computation. Such calculations have been used to create large databases containing the calculated properties of existing and hypothetical materials, many of which have appeared online.
How to cite OPTIMADE
Should you wish to cite the OPTIMADE specification, please use the following:
- Evans et al, Developments and applications of the OPTIMADE API for materials discovery, design, and data exchange, Digital Discovery (2024) 10.1039/D4DD00039K (preprint: 10.48550/arXiv.2402.0057)
- Andersen et al, OPTIMADE, an API for exchanging materials data, Sci. Data 8, 217 (2021) 10.1038/s41597-021-00974-z
- Andersen et al, The OPTIMADE Specification, Zenodo, 10.5281/zenodo.4195050
If you use the optimade-python-tools to access or serve OPTIMADE APIs, please consider citing the following:
- Evans et al, optimade-python-tools: A Python library for serving and consuming materials data via OPTIMADE APIs, Journal of Open Source Software, 6 (65), 3458 (2021), 10.21105/joss.03458
Get involved
All of our work is openly available under the Materials-Consortia organization on GitHub and we welcome all contributions.
We would love to help you create and register your own OPTIMADE API implementations and hear your feedback on the specification.
We meet monthly Jitsi (join with the room code OPTIMADE); everyone is welcome to join the discussion, please feel free to reach out on the mailing list
dev[at]optimade.org to register your interest.
The next meeting will take place on Friday 15th November 2024 at 16:00 UTC/17:00 CEST.
Besides GitHub, we use Slack for developer communication. If you wish to join the workspace, please feel free to use this invite link.
With the support of CECAM, we hold annual workshops to discuss and develop the specification and related ideas.
OMDI2021: Related to the central OPTIMADE efforts, the Workshop on Ontologies for Materials-Databases Interoperability 2021 was held at Linköping University, Sweden on October 5-7, 2021. To read more about OMDI2021 go to the workshop site or the Linköping University event site.