Hierarchical subject tree for Materials Science & Engineering

One of the key outputs from the CORE-Materials project is to develop a hierarchical subject tree to help users browse and filter their search results.

As an interdisciplinary discipline, developing a genuine 'taxonomy' for Materials is perhaps unrealistic, but we can develop a useful set of hierarchical 'facets' through which users from all types of background might wish to access our resources. Therefore we will enable users to search by materials types, processes, applications, scientific concepts, plus a range of other 'top-level' categories, as follows:

• Science approaches
• Materials
• Processes
• Applications
• Product Forms
• Properties
• Testing, analysis & experimentation
• Scale
• Others (Sustainability, Management, Design, Health & Safety...)
  

At the project outset, we asked our partners to contribute to the process of building our subject tree and would like to thank them for their good ideas. Naturally we have been able to incorporate some and not others, but we have now come up with a good starting point - one which we can use to classify the resources we currently have.

The subject tree is unlikely ever to be 'final' and will be able to alter it as the project progresses.

Click here to check out the current tree.