HAW4Mat

HAW4Mat – Feeding the Materials Knowledge Base

HAW4Mat is an initiative of German Universities of Applied Sciences (HAW) that collects materials testing data from teaching and research labs and makes it FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable).

Almost every technically oriented HAW runs a materials testing lab, where students regularly perform standardized tests such as tensile, hardness and Charpy impact tests as well as metallographic examinations. Each semester, these tests produce thousands of datasets that are usually discarded after the lab report. HAW4Mat brings this data together using shared templates, metadata standards and ontologies developed in the Platform MaterialDigital (PMD) ecosystem. The result is a growing knowledge base that reflects real-world scatter, machine characteristics and material batches.

Goals:

• Education: teaching data literacy and research data management by walking students through the full data lifecycle, from measurement to publication

• Infrastructure: building an open, ontology-based data collection of materials, specimens, test parameters and results

• Research and transfer: providing reference data for industry and research, e.g. for round-robin comparisons or for training AI-based material models

Participating universities (pilot phase, starting in 2026): Hochschule Offenburg (coordination) · Hochschule Trier · Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg · Hochschule Kaiserslautern · Hochschule Kempten

Contact: Prof. Dr. Thomas Seifert, Hochschule Offenburg – thomas.seifert@hs-offenburg.de