Nanofabs

A nanofab is a collection of advanced nanotech facilities that a company/ research group may book for a certain time to do its own research. The need for nanofabs stems from the raising cost and complexity of the equipment needed for top-level nanotechnology.
Since different kinds of research, all done at the 1nm to 100nm scale, require almost the same equipment and skilled personnel, it is advantageous for different research groups and sometimes small nanotech companies to share the same facilities.
In Europe nanofabs are either an asset of big research centers or facilities controlled by a panel representative of the research groups/companies that built them; in the US these facilities are mainly independent services and have been organized in the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network.
In the Nanomat link collection you may find links to important nanofabs around the world.

Classifying Nanotechnology

In these days I was looking for a good way to classify nanotechnology for the groups I'm creating on simpy and diigo , I know that the basic idea of folksonomy is that everyone choses it's own tags and if there are enough people tagging, than there will be good tags for everyone. Anyway I'm starting this nanotechnology tagging groups alone, and I would like to suggest some specific tags.
Recently I found out that this problem has been solved about an year ago by the
European Patent Office. They identified 6 main (partially overlapping) fields:
Y01N2 Nanobio
Y01N4 Nanoelectronics
Y01N6 Nanomaterials
Y01N8 Nanotools
Y01N10 Nanooptics
Y01N12 Nanomagnetics

There is a definition for all of these fields in the esp@cenet portal, but they are of not immediate interpretation because they cross refer to other patent classifications, so I'll write down some less accurate but more user friendly definitions in the next weeks.

Nanovip

Nanovip is a very attracting service website for the nanotech fans and operators.
It provides a list of nanotechnology companies and institutions each with a brief description and some contact information. To this time much of the material has been posted by people from the website itself (like Bej) but there is good hope that has the popularity of the service will increase more people will cooperate to take it up-to-date.
I like the geographical organization of the links, what I miss are tags indicating research topics between the academic institutions. It would be great to add these additional informations in the NANOMAT survey.

The nanoresearch database

One of the aims of this blog is to help the creation of a database on nanotechnology research centers to provide as a result of the NANOMAT project; this blog is connected to a social bookmarking website, that will contain all the websites and tags associated to them. Tags are ment to classify websites by their nanotecnological fields, region in the word, and to divide them between research centers (that will go in the survay) and other resources, like nanoscience and nanotechnology networks.

Introduction

This blog has been created as part of my activity in the project NANOMAT, that supports nanotechnology research and technology transfer in my region, Piedmont (Italy) .
It seeks to provide a forum to discuss the different fields of nanoscience research, with a focus on public research and the different ways governments and regional authorities around the world are addressing the growing importance of nanotechnology for their economic development.