Materialsor

Materialsor is a term used in materials science and materials informatics to denote a multi-criteria representation of a material’s suitability for a given application. The word blends “material” with the logical operator “or,” reflecting decision-making processes that accept any of several acceptable attributes rather than a single optimal value. In practical use, a materialsor captures a set of descriptors—such as composition, structure, processing history, and predicted or measured properties—so that a material can be compared against multiple objectives.

Representations of a materialsor may take the form of feature vectors, ontologies, or graphs that encode the relationships between composition, crystal structure, microstructure, and properties. Materialsor data are assembled from experiments, simulations, and predictive models and are integrated into materials databases and informatics workflows. In screening and discovery pipelines, the materialsor serves as input to multi-objective optimization, ranking, and explainable decision-making, enabling researchers to identify candidates that satisfy several criteria simultaneously.

Advantages include structured, transparent trade-off analysis across objectives and easier interoperability among databases. Challenges involve agreeing on standard descriptor sets, handling incomplete or noisy data, avoiding bias, and ensuring that the representation remains interpretable as the knowledge base evolves. While not a universally adopted term, materialsor is used in some discussions of multi-criteria materials discovery and decision support. See also materials informatics, materials genome, descriptors, and multi-objective optimization.