2026-01-04
From literature figures to reusable spectral datasets for emissivity research
The EKHI database is an open, web-accessible repository designed to make optical and radiative property data from the scientific literature searchable, inspectable, citable, and directly reusable. Hosted at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), EKHI provides structured access to curve-level datasets associated with peer-reviewed publications, addressing a long-standing bottleneck in radiative heat-transfer and emissivity research: the fragmentation of high-quality experimental data across thousands of articles and handbooks.
At the time of writing, EKHI aggregates 167 publications and 1251 individual dataset entries, already constituting a corpus large enough to support comparative studies, benchmarking activities, and model validation across multiple materials classes and application domains.
EKHI is organised around scientific publications, reflecting how radiative and optical data are traditionally generated, validated, and cited. Users can search the database by title, abstract keywords, authors, or DOI, and browse the results through a paginated interface. Each publication entry acts as a container for one or more data entries, typically corresponding to individual curves or sets of curves reported in the original work.
This publication-centred approach ensures that data are never detached from their scientific context, while still enabling direct numerical reuse.
Within each publication record, EKHI exposes one or more dataset entries, each associated with a specific:
Each entry corresponds, in practice, to a single curve or a well-defined set of curves, rather than to a vague material average. This level of granularity is essential for radiative-property work, where temperature, surface condition, and spectral band strongly condition the results.
For each dataset entry, EKHI provides an in-browser tabulated view of the numerical data ("View table"). This allows users to rapidly assess units, resolution, spectral range, and general consistency before committing to a download.
Each curve can be downloaded in JSON format, enabling immediate integration into computational workflows (Python, MATLAB, Julia, R, etc.) without manual digitisation or reformatting. This design choice significantly lowers the barrier between literature data and quantitative modelling.
A defining feature of EKHI is its explicit treatment of data provenance. For each curve, the database documents:
This provenance chain is presented transparently on the dataset page itself, supporting proper citation, reproducibility assessments, and informed judgement about uncertainty and data quality.
Each publication record in EKHI provides:
This reinforces a core principle of the database: EKHI does not replace the original literature, but amplifies its usability, ensuring that experimental work continues to receive appropriate credit when its data are reused in modelling, comparison, or synthesis studies.
Researchers can directly import spectral datasets from EKHI into radiative transfer or thermal balance models, avoiding the traditional sequence of figure digitisation, interpolation, and manual unit checking. The availability of curve-level metadata (temperature, wavelength limits) supports physically consistent model inputs.
EKHI provides a practical reference for benchmarking emissometers, spectro-reflectometers, and radiative measurement setups. By comparing new measurements against well-documented literature curves under comparable conditions, users can identify calibration offsets, angular effects, or specimen-preparation artefacts.
For coatings, ceramics, glasses, and semiconductors, EKHI enables cross-publication comparison of spectral behaviour, supporting material selection, design of radiative surfaces, and identification of gaps in existing experimental coverage.
The combination of DOI-anchored context, visible tables, and downloadable numerical data makes EKHI particularly suitable for teaching and training. Students can be guided from a literature reference to numerical analysis within a single session, reinforcing best practices in data citation and reproducibility.
From the perspective of emissivity and radiative-properties research, EKHI addresses several long-standing issues:
These characteristics make EKHI a natural complement to experimental facilities, modelling tools, and emerging data-driven approaches in thermal radiation.
The EKHI database is designed as a living scientific resource. The broader community is explicitly invited to engage with it in several ways:
By aligning rigorous provenance with practical usability, EKHI aims to evolve into a shared reference point for the optical and radiative-properties community.
EKHI represents a concrete step toward open, reusable, and citable radiative-property data. Its publication-anchored structure, curve-level granularity, and emphasis on provenance respond directly to the needs of researchers working at the interface of experiment, modelling, and application.
For the emissivity community, EKHI is not merely a database to consult, but an infrastructure to build upon.