This work is one of a series of articles by the Nanomaterial Data Curation Initiative. Other articles in this series discuss data curation workflows, data completeness and quality, curator ...responsibilities, and metadata. Many groups within the broad nanotechnology field are already developing data repositories and tools driven by their individual organizational goals. Integrating these data across disciplines, and with other non-nanotechnology resources, can support multiple objectives by reusing the same information, and can serve as the impetus for novel scientific discoveries through deeper data analyses. Based on the results of a community-based survey of organizations that maintain nanomaterial repositories, this article discusses current data integration practices in nanoinformatics and mature fields such as genomics, as well as nanotechnology-specific challenges impacting data integration. Recommendations for achieving integration of existing operational nanotechnology resources, as based on results from a community-wide survey, are presented herein. Nanotechnology-specific data integration challenges, if effectively resolved, can foster the application and validation of nanotechnology within and across disciplines.
