Designing new materials suitable for specific applications is a long, complex, and costly process. Researchers think of new ideas based on intuition and experience. Their synthesis and evaluation require a tremendous amount of trial and error.

In the last few years, there has been a major game change in materials design. Thanks to the exponential growth of computer power and the development of robust first-principles electronic structure codes, it has become possible to perform large sets of calculations automatically. This is the burgeoning area of high-throughput ab initio computation. Such calculations have been used to create large databases containing the calculated properties of existing and hypothetical materials, many of which have appeared online:

the AFLOW distributed materials property repository
AiiDA
the Harvard Clean Energy Project Database
the Materials Project
the NoMaD (Novel Materials Discovery) Repository
the Open Quantum Materials Database
the Computational Materials Repository
the Data Catalyst Genome

The aim of OPTiMaDe is to work in the direction of making these databases inter-operational by developing a common REST API. The version 0.9.5 (list of contributors 0.9.5) is now available. It can also be downloaded from GitHub, and which is available at $https://github.com/Materials-Consortia/OPTiMaDe$