The Defense Materials Manufacturing and Infrastructure (DMMI) Standing Committee convened a workshop on February 5 and 6, 2014, to discuss the impact of big data on materials and manufacturing. The DMMI standing committee is organized under the auspices of the National Materials and Manufacturing Board of the National Research Council (NRC) and with the sponsorship of Reliance 21, a Department of Defense (DOD) group of professionals that was established in the DOD science and technology community to increase awareness of DOD science and technology activities and increase coordination among the DOD services, components, and agencies.
This report has been prepared by the workshop rapporteur as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. The planning committee’s role was limited to planning and convening the workshop. The views contained in the report are those of individual workshop participants and do not necessarily represent the views of the workshop participants as a whole, the planning committee, or the National Research Council.
To conduct its workshop on big data, the DMMI standing committee first organized a workshop planning committee to identify workshop topics and agenda items, speakers, and guests to be invited. The planning committee consulted with Reliance 21 and members of the community to develop and organize the workshop. The workshop was held at the National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. Approximately 50 participants, including speakers, members of the DMMI standing committee, Reliance 21, invited guests, and members of the public, participated in the two-day workshop.
Some of the topics addressed at the workshop included these:
- Any unusual aspects of materials and manufacturing needs compared to other big data efforts.
- Data ownership and access, including materials property data.
- Collaboration and the exploitation of big data’s capabilities, including information exchange, validation, and security.
- Cost and ease of maintenance of data, including any associated infrastructure needed.
- Assuring the pedigree of the data and metadata.
- A general understanding of the materials community’s wants and needs in big data.
To assist the reader, a short summary of recurring themes from the workshop presentations and discussions is presented below. These six themes are merely a short description of the items that were discussed by multiple speakers or participants during the course of the workshop. They were identified for this report by the rapporteur, not by the workshop participants.
- Data availability.
- Data size: “big data” vs. data.
- Quality and veracity of data and models.
- Data and metadata ontology and formats.
- Metadata and model availability.
- Culture.
Within each theme, the discussion addressed current concerns, needs, or requirements—in other words, “challenges”—and potential improvements.
After briefly describing the recurring themes, the report summarizes the workshop presentations and discussions. Appendix A contains the statement of task for the workshop. Appendix B lists the workshop participants. Appendix C is the workshop agenda, and Appendix D defines acronyms used in this report.