FAIRmat is the NFDI consortium dedicated to establish a FAIR data infrastructure for condensed matter physics. Its central tool is the NOMAD hub. Having started as a repository for computational materials-science data, NOMAD’s functionality has been significantly expanded. Not only has its computational support been extended to excited-state calculations from many-body theories, classical molecular-dynamics simulations, and complex simulation workflows, it has also become a platform for sample synthesis, various experimental techniques, and an array of use cases. These advances have been achieved through FAIRmat´s development of (meta)data models and tools to process and describe the plethora of heterogeneous data available within the large materials-science community. Today, NOMAD contains 13 million entries, representing more than 3 million materials.
A second strand of FAIRmat’s endeavor is to simplify the various components of the research data workflow for experiments. One may start a new experiment with the configurable NOMAD CAMELS software, which controls the instruments and provides metadata-rich research data output. Once the data are available, they can be fed into NOMAD Oasis, a local copy of NOMAD that can be tailored to serve the specific needs of individual labs. There, one can perform transformations, analyses and comparisons.
However, the complexity of solid-state physics and materials science imposes challenges. We will discuss strategies to increase data literacy among the investigators and involve the instrument manufacturers in the research data endeavor.