Materials and Processes Research and the Information Highway: Summary Record of a Workshop (1996)

A workshop was held on April 12 and 13, 1996, to provide a forum for gathering information pertinent to using the information highway (the Internet and the World Wide Web) for materials and processes (M&P) research. The workshop's objectives were to identify the priority needs of materials and processes researchers that could be addressed through the Internet, to describe the relevant capabilities of the information highway, to review existing applications of the highway in materials research and related fields for lessons learned, and to identify potential opportunities and key issues. The workshop was planned and organized by the Committee on Materials and Processes Research and the Information Highway, which was established by the National Materials Advisory Board (NMAB) of the National Research Council (NRC). The workshop was requested and sponsored by the Defense Reliance Technology Panel for Advanced Materials.

In planning the workshop, the committee assessed the priority needs of the M&P community and identified four major topics for discussion which addressed those needs:

• access to sources of M&P information on the Internet

• use of the Internet for collaboration by M&P researchers

• sharing the use of scientific equipment and computational resources by means of the Internet

• use of the Internet as a learning medium for M&P professionals as well as university students

Twenty presentations were chosen and five discussion groups were organized to address these major topics. The presentations included descriptions as well as demonstrations of current and developing Internet applications in research to allow participants to discuss their applicability to materials and processes (M&P) research and to ascertain lessons learned. The relevant capabilities of the Internet were addressed in terms of tools and Internet requirements that would facilitate its use by the M&P researcher. Workshop participants were selected to provide a balance between the M&P research community, experts in Internet applications, and developers of Internet tools. In addition, the participants were selected to provide a broad representation from government, industry, materials technical societies, national laboratories, and universities.

Apart from this synopsis and the introduction, this report consists of summaries of the individual presentations given during the workshop as well as summaries of the deliberations of the five discussion groups. These summaries have been reviewed for completeness and accuracy by the presenters. The views expressed are those of the workshop participants themselves and do not reflect the judgments of the committee.

The next three sections of this synopsis present the results of the workshop.

The workshop participants were asked to define potential opportunities for applications of the Internet that would meet the priority needs of the M&P research community. They identified the following:

The multicasting capabilities of the Internet can be used for widespread and timely communication of end-user needs and materials researchers ' development capabilities. Both groups have a strong economic interest in matching materials needs for product development with materials development capabilities. The Internet could make possible the creation of a concurrent engineering environment coupling end-users with materials researchers. It can foster the exchange of product and materials technology roadmaps.

This would be a distributed electronic compilation of microstructural images annotated to permit rapid comparisons and correlations of the microstructural features, material properties, processing conditions, and other descriptors of materials. Such a “handbook” could reduce the number of duplicate experiments conducted to ascertain already-characterized microstructures. By providing rapid access to categorizations of material defect structures, the handbook could also become a valuable tool for quality assessment and failure analysis at manufacturing facilities.

The Internet could be the vehicle for accessing easily expandable and electronically searchable distributed databases. The databases would allow researchers to obtain information about the most recent developments in materials science as new databases come on-line and existing ones are expanded. The metadata in these databases would permit searches according to desired parameters as well as giving researchers the ability to merge and correlate data from different sources quickly and easily. These databases could be linked directly to product design tools to provide materials property data to the designers.

The Internet offers a way for researchers to conduct experiments and analyses on remote equipment and computational tools. The advantages include access to the best existing facilities regardless of geographical location, much fuller utilization of expensive resources, and a reduction in capital expenditures to build duplicate facilities. Candidates for sharing through remote access include high-voltage electron microscopes, nuclear magnetic resonance facilities, spectroscopic instruments, micro and nanofabrication facilities, high-power computing resources, and a variety of software tools for virtual design of materials.

The Internet could become a way to enhance collaboration in materials research by giving researchers the ability to identify experts and institutions that could be quickly and easily consulted on particular problems in materials research, engineering, and processing. Multimedia description of problems would enhance the Internet's utility beyond the text-based exchange of information currently used on the Internet.

If the M&P community is to make truly effective use of the information highway, various barriers will have to be overcome and various issues will have to be resolved. Some of these barriers and issues are the results of attitudes within the M&P community itself, while others are either financial or technical in nature. Often, the barriers and issues overlap, complicating the task of finding ways to deal with them. What follows are the major barriers and issues as seen by the workshop 's participants.

There are limited amounts of useful M&P information and data available for materials and processes researchers and materials end-users on the Internet today. The reasons for this are:

• The reluctance of traditional publishers in the field (mainly technical societies) to extensively engage in electronic publishing. This reluctance is fostered by the perception of significant financial risk associated with (a) the high cost of developing electronic publishing capabilities and products, (b) loss of revenue from eliminated traditional paper publications, and (c) the uncertainty of collecting sufficient fees for electronic publication to cover the costs of the services. In addition, it is felt that the membership does not want to assume financial

commitments that could result in higher membership fees or insolvency of the society.

• Many sources of valuable materials and processes data will not make the information available because of proprietary concerns. This is particularly true for materials end-users, who invest large amounts of money in testing and qualification of materials for their products.

• The materials community has not united to obtain funding for the development of priority information sources required by the community to make extensive use of the Internet. An example of such an effort in another field was the initiation of the Human Genome project.

• In general, there is no clear-cut economic incentive for developing and maintaining M&P information sources for the Internet.

There are also impediments for materials and processes researchers to effectively use what is available today or being developed for use on the Internet:

• Materials and processes databases which are provided by different sources cannot be easily searched, merged, analyzed, or correlated. This is because there is no accepted common taxonomy for the information.

• There is an inability to discern the credibility of on-line data and consequently a reluctance to use it. This is because it generally does not provide a description of the pedigree for the information. Traditional paper information sources are often given credibility by the publisher (e.g., technical society), who serves as the mediator for the information. Participants expressed the need for human expert, technical society, or a machine mediator to fill this role.

• Searches for materials and processes information for a specific problem are difficult because current search engines or methods are not capable of filtering out much of the irrelevant information. The need for an intelligent “search agent” (human or machine) was expressed.

• The extensive adoption of remote experimentation, computation, and analysis by M&P researchers requires advances in higher bandwidth and quality connectivity for the Internet.

• Concern was expressed that the simulation tools being developed for virtual design of materials and processes, tools for remote experimentation, and tools for collaboration are being developed with customized software. Consequently, these applications may not be easily maintained in the future after funding for development is concluded.

There is a degree of apathy and reluctance in the M&P research community to make use of information resources on the Internet. The reasons for this, as expressed by the workshop participants, are:

• The general perception that there are no clear-cut benefits to be obtained from use of the Internet. Paper information sources are felt to be “good enough” for present needs.

• The materials and processes research community as a whole is not inclined toward computer use and to take advantage of the Internet. However, this attitude is changing with the influx of recent grauates who have a high degree of enthusiasm for the use of computer tools.

The presentations and discussions at the workshop produced a number of suggestions on how the Internet could benefit the M&P community and identified the barriers to its use. The workshop was not specifically designed to provide solutions for the problems generated by the barriers. However, the following “lessons learned” from the discussions by the participants can be used as guidelines in the task of removing the impediments to the use of the Internet as a beneficial tool in materials and processes research:

• A concerted effort is needed to demonstrate to the M&P community how the Internet can become an extremely valuable tool for conducting materials and processes research.

• The professional societies involved in M&P research, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, should begin to become providers, brokers, and mediators of information on the Internet as a logical extension of their current role in providing these functions for M&P information in printed publications.

• A description of how the American Vacuum Society succeeded in developing an electronic publishing capability while minimizing the financial risks should be widely distributed as a model to other professional societies that deal with materials.

• A common taxonomy needs to be defined for M&P information distributed on the Internet to facilitate search, merge, analysis, and correlation capabilities. In addition, the M&P information should include metadata that specifies the pedigree of the information.

• Ways should be sought to turn software tools which are currently being developed for simulation in the virtual design of materials, for remote experimentation, and for collaboration into commercial products which will be maintained and supported for the M&P community.

• A strong effort should be made to unite the various specialties of the M&P community in an organization capable of speaking with a “single voice” to seek support for initiatives intended to improve and expand M&P researcher use of the Internet.