OpenMaterialData is the project my team and I worked on this year's AEC Hackathon in Copenhagen.

The idea is to leverage open-source's community driven approach to make product and material data more usable.

Product and material data is widely accessible through its various manufacturers, private organizations or public initiatives. The data landscape is however fractured and you would often have to copy and paste material properties into a spreadsheet to get a complete dataset. For example, you might be interested in a specific insulation material.

• The manufacturer will have the physical and mechanical properties, like density, U-value and fire resistance
• You have to find the environmental impact data from a public organization like ECOplatform
• Material for rendering can be found in a collection from a render software provider

Our solution is not to propose a central database for providing product and material data.

• It would be an incomprehensible task to get all data providers to submit data to a central location

Instead, we propose an interface to the network of databases and data providers that already exists. The idea is similar to how search engines like Google works. Search engines doesn't hold any data, but has an index that helps to navigate users to the data they want. On top of that we want to enable users to add metadata with links between data points, so the above example with the insulation material can be retrieved in a single hit.

Are you interested in hearing more or helping out getting the project of the ground, please reach out!