The material sciences industry is undergoing a resurgence in R&D in the new areas of conjugated, ionic, and biodegradable polymers. Flat-film display screens, LCDs, energy-generating systems, polymeric drug delivery systems, and other emerging polymer applications have fueled R&D activities in established companies and helped create new start-ups. Furthermore, recent developments in nanotechnology have created a burst of R&D activities to find new polymeric materials to satisfy design parameters for small-scale devices.

Under contract to a software company, GGA developed a SQL database on the properties of advanced polymers. For this project, GGA cored data directly from scientific publications and created data structures covering hundreds of property categories. GGA also created graphical displays for diverse properties, spectra, and polymer structures, and developed a computational engine to compute polymer properties.

In addition, GGA performed all of the associated data selection, organization, and entry for the database, which had to be scalable and exist on two platforms (Windows and client-server). Our content and software teams worked together to complete the first release on time and within budget. Prior to completing the polymer properties database, GGA created a database containing more than 1.5 million properties of over 200,000 inorganic materials, plus property computations. This database was produced in both a CD-ROM format and a Web-based version.