Categories are organized in a tree structure. For example, a user would drill down from manufactured products to personal products, cosmetics and lipstick. This is intended to be all the information you would ever want or need about the material, attached to the spectrum, Ward said. Peaks and valleys The power of the prototype database lies in its ability to search by multiple criteria. That s very simple, but we ve never had that capability before, Ward said.
Users can limit searches by material or color category.
They can also initiate searches by keyword or by chemical composition. It s designed for the person who doesn t have necessarily a good materials sense, Ward said. A best-fit search performs statistical tests to find the most probable matches between known and unknown spectra. But the X-ray spectral database is only as good as the number of entries in it, Ward said. Ward has been building the database by scanning the spectra of used cosmetics donated by coworkers.