ASM International announced the upcoming launch of the new Data Ecosystem, which seeks to package digital materials technologies in an all-in-one platform. The Data Ecosystem Workbench will provide a custom and secure workspace for users to extract value from their analytical work for further discovery, transformation, or curation.

ASM has conducted extensive market research via expert interviews, Member surveys, and focus groups, to guide focus of Data Ecosystem. The Data Ecosystem represents a change in how ASM will bring greater value to its membership and the scientific community.

The value of the Data Ecosystem starts with collecting and providing relevant materials data. ASM will transform data within its Digital Database products into machine readable formats, as well as form relationships with data contributors to support the industry needs around design simulation and advanced analytics such as machine learning.

The next critical piece in this initiative is educating users on what can be done and how to do it. Students will be taught both the “why” and “how” of going faster in a materials 4.0 business environment. The first two courses will cover heat treat process simulation and materials data management fundamentals.

The last, and enabling piece of the Data Ecosystem brings innovative organizations with advanced materials and analytical tools together in one Software as a Service (SaaS) platform—the Data Ecosystem Workbench. This secure platform will provide data structure, storage, and computational power for creating advanced analytical work products.

“Data has become the fuel of progress and advanced analytics is the engine that turns data into knowledge and solutions,” Dr. Ray Fryan, ASM’s executive director of product development, said. “Whether we’re talking materials design, processing, or performance, Materials 4.0 will accelerate our members’ performance. With our 100+ year history as ‘the materials information society,’ we believe ASM is the logical choice to enable Materials 4.0 for our members. In a nutshell, via Data Ecosystem, we’ll help our members predict more, and experiment less, reuse data more, and recreate data less, and that is a big deal.”