A Lightweight Material Library for Scientific Computing in C plus

Simulations in the field of scientific computing require often the availability of large sets of material properties. We propose a convenient approach for a lightweight material library using available open source tools. The presented approach is therefore suited for embedding into larger projects, such as simulators. The XML file format as well as an XML parser library is used to store, load, and manage the data. The location of data items or data sets is specified using XPath query language. Furthermore, an utility is provided for the conversion of the initially untyped data items to the numerical data types required by the simulation package. As performance is an issue in this context, we present a simple use case.