materialsoriginal

Materialsoriginal is a conceptual standard and repository designed to capture the origin, provenance, and licensing of physical materials used in research and development. It aims to document original materials—from raw chemicals and synthesized compounds to commercially sourced items—along with their production methods, batch identifiers, supplier information, and licensing terms. By centralizing provenance data, materialsoriginal supports reproducibility and intellectual property protection.

The scope includes inorganic, organic, polymers, composites, and nanomaterials, and accommodates both laboratory-synthesized materials and industrial-scale materials. The data model emphasizes provenance, traceability, and interoperability, and is designed to complement broader materials databases by adding a persistent origin record for each material entry.

Core entities include Material, Lot, Source, Process, License, and Characterization; relationships link each material to its origin event and associated metadata. The standard encourages controlled vocabularies, persistent identifiers, and machine-readable formats (for example RDF/JSON-LD) to enable cross-database searching and data integration.

Governance and licensing address intellectual property concerns, enabling researchers to indicate licensing terms, usage permissions, and embargo periods while promoting data sharing under clear terms.

Development and adoption have been exploratory and collaborative, involving universities, national labs, and industry groups. While not universally adopted, materialsoriginal has influenced data governance practices in materials science and has informed discussions about data provenance, reproducibility, and open science.

Related concepts include provenance in scientific data, materials informatics, and data standards for materials databases.