Kadi4Mat is the Karlsruhe Data Infrastructure for Materials Science, an open source software for managing research data. The goal of this project is to combine the ability to manage and exchange data, the repository, with the possibility to analyze, visualize and transform said data, the electronic lab notebook (ELN).

Kadi4Mat supports a close cooperation between experimenters, theorists and simulators, especially in materials science, to enable the acquisition of new knowledge and the development of novel materials. This is made possible by employing a modular and generic architecture, which allows to cover the specific needs of different scientists, each utilizing unique workflows. At the same time, this opens up the possibility of covering other research disciplines as well.

The focus on the repository component is on warm data, i.e. unpublished data that is yet to be analysed further, while in the ELN component it is on the automated and documented execution of heterogeneous workflows. The components are therefore best described as community repository and ELN 2.0 respectively. In this way, a virtual research environment is created that facilitates collaboration between researchers. The long-term goal of Kadi4Mat is to electronically record the entire scientific workflow of daily research work.