Applications of Digital Material Certificates

S1SEVEN 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 we have developed in cooperation with one of our team members, Achim Hofmann, that enable rapid integration into our platform and, most importantly, how to leverage the opportunities that digital material data offers.

Achim is a material scientist with over 20 years of experience in the aerospace industry, an industry known for requiring only the best from its suppliers. In his work, he regularly had to manually enter large amounts of data in Excel sheets to analyze the quality of materials. He is a big fan of our developments — they enable large quantities of material data to be processed and analyzed with minimal effort.

Here is the full list of articles — read all of them in the given order, or pick the ones of your highest interest.

1. What is Node-Red, and how can I install it?
2. How to get the most out of JSON certificates using Node-Red
3. Interacting with the S1SEVEN API using Node-Red — Part 1 Validating certificates
4. Interacting with the S1SEVEN API with Node-Red — Part 2 Notarizing certificates
5. Creating a Scatter Chart using a folder of JSON certificates
6. Saving certificates to Azure using Node-Red
7. Use S1SEVEN’s certificate tools to render a JSON certificate as a PDF
8. Interacting with the S1SEVEN API via our custom Node-Red module

If you have any thoughts or questions, please add them as comments.