This workshop will scope and strengthen the technology that will be needed to complete the full database for "The Web of Chemicals and Materials", which is to include the molecular building processes for the approximately 100,000 chemicals and materials used commercially to make nearly every product in current use by global society. A significant contribution of "The Web of Chemicals and Materials" is to be a democratized, open source database for industry and academic researchers, public policy makers, and the general public. The creation of a common scaffolding on which researchers from many institutions across the globe can participate and add new utility, holds enormous promise. "The Web of Chemicals and Materials" will enable smart sustainable chemistry through providing information of practical use when new, sustainable materials and chemicals are developed. In that sense, the envisioned database is a form of chemi-informatics that can improve the ease and speed by which environmental information and manufacturing efficiency are included in R&D.
"The Web of Chemicals and Materials" will provide function-based design tools and include orders-of-magnitude more data than are now available, greatly expanding the power of sustainable chemistry. Creating "The Web of Chemicals and Materials" as open-source will have global social benefits by enabling creative thinking and research (undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and industrial R&D), using new tools, expanding by orders-of-magnitude the potential to find smarter green materials and chemicals. Start-ups, expansions, and even whole new industries may emerge as "The Web of Chemicals and Materials" is used to create new products, more efficiencies, jobs, and economic development. The project envisions future use of the data to support innovative new industrial processes, new research in chemical engineering, earth systems science, and basic energy science. The open source availability of these data to global partners could be of great value in efforts to reduce overall process costs, energy consumption, carbon footprints, and environmental impacts.
