Abstract
Nanomaterials are of interest to virtually every scientific discipline and a wide diversity of user communities. To date, however, there is no agreed upon system for describing nanomaterials, especially across disciplines and user communities. A CODATA-VAMAS Joint Working Group has defined a Uniform Description System (UDS) for nanomaterials that takes into account a wide variety of features useful for accurately characterizing a nanomaterial as well as differentiating one nanomaterial from all others. The UDS is applicable to different types of nanomaterials. The UDS is designed to be directly usable in the development of nanoinformatics resources, standards, regulations, commercial purchasing, and reporting research results.