Materials Informatics is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools to solve materials science and engineering problems. The motivation to adapt  informatics tools in the mid 2000's was to significantly accelerate materials discovery and development. Today, the focus increasingly shifts to sustainability, product lifecycle  considerations, and to the discovery of materials to solve our energy production and storage problems. But applications of informatics techniques do not end there. This talk  starts with a general overview of the emerging field and closes with a specific example: An interatomic potential for pure Magnesium based on a neural network architecture.  The neural network approach is compared to other approaches and successful applications of the interatomic potential to fracture processes and prismatic cross-slip in pure Magnesium are shown.