The distributed material database system named 'Data-Free-Way' has been developed by four organizations (the National Institute for Materials Science, the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute, and the Japan Science and Technology Corporation) under a cooperative agreement in order to share fresh and stimulating information as well as accumulated information for the development of advanced nuclear materials, for the design of structural components, etc.
In order to create additional values of the system, knowledge base system, in which knowledge extracted from the material database is expressed, is planned to be developed for more effective utilization of Data-Free-Way. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has been adopted as the description method of the retrieved results and the meaning of them. One knowledge note described with XML is stored as one knowledge which composes the knowledge base. Since this knowledge note is described with XML, the user can easily convert the display form of the table and the graph into the data format which the user usually uses.
This paper describes the current status of Data-Free-Way, the description method of knowledge extracted from the material database with XML and the distributed material knowledge base system.
