Chances and Challenges in Fusing Data Science with Materials Science

Abstract Data science and informatics have emerged as the fourth paradigm of scientific research over the past decade. Although the impact of this new paradigm is very apparent in many scientific fields and has seen many success stories, the field of materials informatics – data science and informatics for materials science and engineering – is still in its infancy. Based on the availability of data, the field of materials science would be ideal for data analytics and informatics, particularly if such data is shared with the larger materials science community. In this work, we discuss the advantages of digitalization and data science, current challenges for experiments and simulations involving data management, acquisition and sharing, and look at possible solutions.