Metis is an open scientific framework, materials data organizer, and collaborative online platform for the nanotechnology research. It was designed for the materials research teams at the physical and virtual laboratories. Metis is an AI-ready solution, aiming to bring the recent advances of computer science into a rather conservative area of new materials development and quality control. Metis currently focuses on the X-ray powder diffraction and atomistic simulations. It was started in 2021 in BASF (Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany) by Bernd Hinrichsen and Evgeny Blokhin.

This is the second part of the whole Metis infra: GUI ⇄ BFF ⇄ backend.

Whereas the scientific features of Metis are handled with its backend, this BFF provides user and access management, as well as the backend proxy. The scientific data are represented by the abstract datasource objects, managed by GUI users or scripted clients via the standard application programming interface (API).

• node -v >= 15
• npm -v >= 7
• Postgres (any relatively new)

NB to upgrade node you may run npm install -g n && n lts and re-start the shell.

cp conf/env.ini.sample conf/env.ini
npm install
npm run db-migrate
npm run db-seed

npm run dev

npm run start

Configure the development and production settings in conf/env.ini file.

The BFF database schema is presented above (see db/migrations script).

By design, BFF knows very little about the scientific data and is only responsible for the users and access management.

On top of the users, the main concepts mapped onto the database are:

• datasources (static data sent to the backend)
• calculations (transitions of data into the other data)
• collections (groups of the data)

Note, that the non-versioned routes without /v0 will be redirected as is to the backend.

The docs are generated with the apidoc:

npm run apidoc

and, optionally, swagger:

npm run apidoc-swagger

Also, there is the Python API client metis-client (on PyPI) consuming all the public Metis API methods.

Copyright 2021-2023 BASF SE

BSD 3-Clause