Health and environmental safety of nanomaterials: O Data, Where Art Thou?

Abstract

Nanotechnology keeps drawing attention due to the great tunable properties of nanomaterials in comparison to their bulk conventional materials. The growth of nanotechnology in combination with the digitization era has led to an increased need of safety related data. In addition to safety, new data-driven paradigms on safe and sustainable by design materials are stressing the necessity of data even more. Data is a fundamental asset to the scientific community in studying and analysing the entire life-cycle of nanomaterials. Unfortunately, data exist in a scattered fashion, in different sources and formats. To our knowledge, there is no study focusing on aspects of actual data-structure knowledge that exists in literature and databases. The purpose of this review research is to transparently and comprehensively, display to the nanoscience community the datasets readily available for machine learning purposes making it convenient and more efficient for the next users such as modellers or data curators to retrieve information. We systematically recorded the features and descriptors available in the datasets and provide synopsised information on their ranges, forms and metrics in the supplementary material.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Data; In silico; Machine learning; Nano.