This database is designed to consolidate information from many sources about the effects of various chemical and biological agents on many different types of materials. When pure research on this type of interaction is funded by official agencies, it has been possible in the past for that information to remain in a “silo” and therefore not available to the next group that needs the information. This cross-agency data repository will save resources by avoiding unnecessary duplication of research efforts. As with many UI projects, GDA’s challenge was to take this vast pool of technical information and make it easily accessible to users of the tool. In this case, our goal was to provide detailed and robust tools to interrogate the database of scientific information through both search and browse methods.
