Materials knowledge and data representation with a European ontology ecosystem
Gerhard Goldbeck
Research interests: FAIR, Metadata, Terminology, Ontology
Goldbeck Consulting, Semantic Materials
EMMC · Semantic Materials
2025-06-16 · 11:50 BST
Since its inception in 2014 as European Materials Modelling Council, the EMMC community has had a strong focus on a physics-based semantic representation of materials sciences, i.e. meaningful metadata, conceptualisation and ontology. Early efforts to adopt existing top-level ontologies failed due to their inability to handle core physics and materials science concepts. Hence the community set out to develop a foundational ontology from scratch, building on fundamental physical science and related analytic philosophy principles. After more than seven years of development, the result is the 1.0.0 release of the EMMO (Elementary Multiperspective Material Ontology). All things described in EMMO are physical (no abstracts), all “Material” entities are foundationally based in the Standard Model, all things we say/know about materials (and other things) are based observations, calculations/simulations or declarations, and things related to each other either by parthood or causality. To make the application of EMMO convenient to the use, a number of “Perspectives” is provided, for example describing a case in terms of Objects and Processes, or in terms of Data/Information. The talk will give an overview of EMMO foundations and how it meets the ISO standard for Top Level Ontologies. Further the release of EMMO 1.0.0 and its modules will be outlined. It provides the basis for domain and application ontologies, which include an extensive set covering many aspects of battery manufacturing, electrochemistry and materials, as well as characterisation and testing. As an example, a Battery Testing case will be provided and a recent example for describing a battery manufacturing digital twin discussed.
Funding acknowledgement
This work received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under GA Nos 952869 and 101137725, respectively, and from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee GA 10091190.