optimade-maker: Automated generation of interoperable materials APIs from static datasets

Abstract

Atomistic structural data are central to materials science, condensed matter physics, and chemistry, and are increasingly digitised across diverse repositories and databases. Interoperable access to these heterogeneous data sources enables reusable clients and tools, and is essential for cross-database analyses and data-driven materials discovery. Toward this aim, the OPTIMADE (Open Databases Integration for Materials Design) specification defines a standard REST API for atomistic structures and related properties. However, deploying and maintaining compliant services remains technically demanding and poses a significant barrier for many data providers. Here, we present optimade-maker, a lightweight toolkit for the automated generation of OPTIMADE-compliant APIs directly from raw atomistic structure and property data. The toolkit supports a wide range of raw datasets, enables conversion to a standardised OPTIMADE data representation, and allows for rapid deployment of APIs in both local and production environments. We further demonstrate it through an automated service on the Materials Cloud Archive, which automatically creates and publishes OPTIMADE APIs for contributed datasets, enabling immediate discoverability and interoperability. In addition, we implement data transformation pipelines for the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) and the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD), enabling unified access to these curated resources through the OPTIMADE framework. By lowering the technical barriers to interoperable data publication, optimade-maker represents an important step toward a scalable, FAIR materials data ecosystem integrating both community contributed and curated databases.