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.