NIMS polymer database PoLyInfo (I): an overarching view of half a million data points

This paper reviews PoLyInfo, which is a polymer database of National Institute for Materials Science of Japan, containing more than half a million data points, from the perspective of a data editor. In particular, we describe how human-readable information provided by a graphical user interface (GUI) is curated, compiled, and displayed on the GUI, and how it can be used for data retrieval. We also describe the data curation policy of PoLyInfo, which can be observed through search functions and data tables, and show the unique taxonomy of various polymers. The status of polymers and their potential and limitations, as seen through a large dataset, are discussed. With this information, we introduce the capabilities of PoLyInfo and provide guidelines for its use as a general database for polymer chemistry, as well as notes on newer data applications such as machine learning.