PNNL

Abstract

This paper is one of a series of articles by the Nanomaterial Data Curation Initiative. Other arti-cles in this series discuss data curation workflows, data completeness and quality, curator respon-sibilities, and metadata. Many groups within the broad nanotechnology field are already develop-ing data repositories and tools driven by their individual organizational goals. Integrating these data across disciplines, and with other non-nanotechnology resources, can support multiple objec-tives by reusing the same information, and can serve as the impetus for novel scientific discoveries through deeper data analyses. Based on the results of a community-based survey of organizations that maintain nanomaterial repositories, this article discusses current data integration practices in nanoinformatics and mature fields such as genomics, as well as nanotechnology-specific chal-lenges impacting data integration. Recommendations for achieving integration of existing opera-tional nanotechnology resources, as based on results from a community-wide survey, are presented herein. Nanotechnology-specific data integration challenges, if effectively resolved, can foster the application and validation of nanotechnology within and across disciplines.