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The Open Databases Integration for Materials Design (OPTIMADE) application programming interface (API) empowers users with holistic access to a growing federation of databases, enhancing the accessibility and discoverability of materials and chemical data. Since the first release of the OPTIMADE specification (v1.0), the API has undergone significant development, leading to the v1.2 release, and has underpinned multiple scientific studies. In this work, we highlight the latest features of the API format, accompanying software tools, and provide an update on the implementation of OPTIMADE in contributing materials databases. We end by providing several use cases that demonstrate the utility of the OPTIMADE API in materials research that continue to drive its ongoing development. 

Abstract In recent years, we have been witnessing a paradigm shift in computational materials science. In fact, traditional methods, mostly developed in the second half of the XXth century, are being complemented, extended, and sometimes even completely replaced by faster, simpler, and often more accurate approaches. The new approaches, that we collectively label by machine learning, have their origins in the fields of informatics and artificial intelligence, but are making rapid inroads in all other branches of science. With this in mind, this Roadmap article, consisting of multiple contributions from experts across the field, discusses the use of machine learning in materials science, and share perspectives on current and future challenges in problems as diverse as the prediction of materials properties, the construction of force-fields, the development of exchange correlation functionals for density-functional theory, the solution of the many-body problem, and more. In spite of the already numerous and exciting success stories, we are just at the beginning of a long path that will reshape materials science for the many challenges of the XXIth century. 

Abstract The Open Databases Integration for Materials Design (OPTIMADE) consortium has designed a universal application programming interface (API) to make materials databases accessible and interoperable. We outline the first stable release of the specification, v1.0, which is already supported by many leading databases and several software packages. We illustrate the advantages of the OPTIMADE API through worked examples on each of the public materials databases that support the full API specification.