MAPLIB-A data bank of FORTRAN functions describing material properties

Abstract

MAPLIB is a program system which is able to incorporate the values of the properties of many materials in a form suitable for computer-aided design. Thus, MAPLIB is a data bank whose customers are not men but computer programs with their much higher scanning rate. Therefore in MAPLIB the data are not stored in tables as usual but in algorithms implemented as FORTRAN functions Such a program system should fulfil a number of conditions related to standardization, flexibility, security, effectivity, transparency and compatibility. In this paper these conditions are discussed in some generality and it is shown how they are implemented in MAPLIB.