14/07/2026
The Institute of Nanoscience of the National Research Council of Italy is participating in Materials Commons, a new European initiative aimed at bringing together shared digital resources, such as data and workflow tools, to form a connected European infrastructure that can be accessed through a single entry point. With its ambitious vision, Materials Commons will play a key role in accelerating innovation, supporting sustainability, and strengthening Europe’s leadership in advanced materials.
Materials Commons seeks to solve the long-standing problem that materials data across Europe is fragmented, difficult to find, and even harder to combine and reuse, hampering AI-driven innovation. Today, data is spread across many platforms, publications, and repositories, often without consistent formats, so it is challenging for researchers and engineers to work efficiently and to exploit the available knowledge.
Materials Commons will create a unified, accessible entry point to Europe’s materials data and digital tools. The project will connect and integrate existing platforms and initiatives, such as Materials Cloud, NOMAD, MaterialDigital, CAPeX, and OPTIMADE, to achieve this. The project aims to make materials innovation smarter and significantly faster by improving data standards, access to high-quality data, and connected digital workflows that link experiments, simulations, and AI tools. An engineer developing a new steel component today may be relying on limited data and need to carry out extensive testing. MaterialsCommons will provide access to richer datasets and advanced digital tools that help predict material properties, which will enable engineers to design and validate better solutions much faster.
Materials Commons is designed to deliver practical benefits for industry. Our industrial partners will ensure that the tools, data services, and digital infrastructure developed address real-world challenges and can be adopted quickly. The project will also support Digital Product Passports with interoperable and traceable data across value chains.
Materials Commons’ developments focus on three areas to accelerate materials development:
1. Building a semantic foundation with common taxonomies, metadata standards, and ontologies that can be readily used via shared schemas.
2. Simplified access to a wide range of materials science data to enable better informed decisions at an early stage of development.
3. More efficient, automated, interconnected and interoperable workflows, for experiments and simulations.
Ultimately, Materials Commons aims to become a leading, foundational platform for materials research services offering support to researchers and engineers across Europe and beyond. The digital infrastructure advances will be demonstrated through real-world use cases.
CNR's contribution to the project is led by its Institute of Nanoscience (CNR Nano), where researcher Deborah Prezzi coordinates the activities dedicated to testing the infrastructure using real scientific datasets employed in materials research. These activities aim to verify the performance of the tools and standards developed by Materials Commons under realistic conditions and to assess their effectiveness in improving the accessibility, comparability, and reusability of scientific data. "The challenge is to help build an infrastructure that makes data not only accessible, but also understandable, interoperable, and reusable," explains Deborah Prezzi (CNR Nano). "Common terminologies, standardized metadata, and interoperable workflows will enable data to 'speak the same language', making research more reproducible and fostering collaboration across disciplines, laboratories, and countries. This is also an essential prerequisite for the reliable use of artificial intelligence tools in materials research".
The Italian participation in the project also includes the University of Bologna, which is contributing to the development of the infrastructure's common semantic framework; the Polytechnic University of Turin (Politecnico di Torino), involved in developing automated laboratories for the discovery and optimization of new battery materials; and the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano), which is developing solutions for quality control across the additive manufacturing value chain.
“MaterialsCommons provides materials scientists and engineers with a unified, secure, and reliable platform to discover and access materials information.” “By starting with richer, more precise information, engineers will be able to develop superior solutions much faster.” — Peter Gumbsch, MaterialsCommons Coordinator About MaterialsCommons MaterialsCommons is a large and diverse consortium of 26 academic partners, 21 associated partners, and 12 associated collaborators.
The project is coordinated by Fraunhofer-Institut für Werkstoffmechanik, Freiburg, Germany. The project kick-off meeting was held on 17 June 2026 at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. MaterialsCommons is co-funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. Grant Agreement No. 101293545.
Per informazioni:
Deborah Prezzi
Cnr Nano
deborah.prezzi@nano.cnr.it
Maddalena Scandola, Cnr Nano Communication Office, email: comunicazione@nano.cnr.it
Ufficio stampa:
Francesca Gorini
Cnr Press Office
francesca.gorini@cnr.it
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