Hannes StiebitzhoferS1SEVEN started with the mission to digitize Material Certificates, also known as Mill Certificates in the steel industry or Certificates of Analysis in the plastics industry.
They contain information about the producer of the material, the business transaction, and of most interest, actual material data: an example, the hardness of steel or the melt mass-flow rate of plastics. Our mission is to digitize them because until now, they have been exchanged as PDF documents which have one significant limitation: it is hard to extract the material data because of the wide variety in formats.
We started by building a well-defined JSON format for steel based on EN 10168, which defines the basic structure for steel products. In cooperation with BASF and a leading company in the fittings industry, we developed a format covering the needs of the plastics industry, implementing some great features. These formats have been made available as Open Source on https://materialidentity.org.
S1SEVENs business is to build and operate a platform that allows market participants to exchange JSON documents in a responsible way enabling everybody to verify the integrity and authenticity of JSON material certificates.
In a series of articles, we want to share some tools to integrate quickly into our platform but, most importantly, how to realize digital material data’s opportunities. For that purpose, we developed simple applications inspired by one of our team members, Achim Hofmann. He is a material scientist with over 20 years of experience in the aerospace industry, which requires suppliers to deliver only the best. In his work, he entered lots of data manually in Excel sheets many times to analyze the quality of materials. He is a big fan of our developments — they enable people to process large quantities of material data with minimal effort.