Abstract
The Materials Information Technology Station (MITS) of the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), has developed a system for retrieving information from its material property databases. The MITS system provides eleven databases : four concerning structural materials, four databases containing physical properties; two databases concerned with superconducting materials, and one database with considerable information about polymers. These have been available on its website (http://mits.nims.go.jp/) since April, 2003. Granta Design Ltd has independently established the Materials Database Network (http://matdata.net/) by linking materials information from a number of key reference sources, world-wide. These include ASM International's Online Material Information System, and sources of information for aerospace alloys, polymers, materials standards, joining etc. The NIMS and Granta systems have now been combined into a single integrated software environment, which enables rapid-searching of the available reference sources and retrieval of top quality materials information from each of them.
