Cambridge, January 2006

The Future of Material Data Management: 7th Meeting of the Material Data Management Consortium

The latest meeting of the Material Data Management Consortium (MDMC) heralded the start of the second three-year phase of this collaborative software development project. It was held at the Largo, Florida facilities of Concurrent Technologies Corporation on January 18 and 19, 2006. Dr. Steven M. Arnold of NASA Glenn Research Center chaired the meeting and started by warmly welcoming AWE (Atomic Weapons Establishment), Honeywell Aerospace, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the three newly joined members, to the consortium.

The meeting was preceded by a series of technical sessions led by Andrew Miller, the manager of the Data and Content Team at Granta. The sessions focused on areas of interest raised by consortium members and included detailed discussions and practical demonstrations of the latest software available to consortium members, but not yet commercially available.

The areas covered included:

• Using import templates to match the data structures in your existing in-house materials workflow
  
• Using export templates to map data in the system to third party software systems for used in your materials engineering analysis groups
  
• Advanced Access Control features in GRANTA MI v1.1 and user-mapping in your enterprise
  
• Database schema development for lab data, qualification data, design data and research projects.

The MDMC members shared their recent experiences using GRANTA MI. Details were exchanged on their implementations, the extent of their use, and the problems they have solved.

One outcome of the collaborative discussion was that MDMC website will be used for sharing experiences and, where possible, the non-proprietary sections of members’ import and export templates.

The three-day session can accurately be characterized as a best-practice forum for electronic materials information management.

The next meeting of the MDMC will be held at the start of August 2006 at Los Alamos National Labs.

For further information, contact:
Dr. Will Marsden, Product Manager, Aerospace and Defense, Granta Design Limited
Tel: 800 241 1546; fax: 216 274 9812; e-mail: will.marsden@grantadesign.com