Ontology-Based Digital Representations of Materials Testing in The MaterialDigital Initiative

The MaterialDigital (PMD) platform has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) by 2019. The platform aims to digitalize materials and processes including the provision of infrastructures to represent complete material lifecycles, considering the FAIR principles (discoverable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). The PMD-funded KupferDigital project is developing a data ecosystem for digital materials research. The fundament of the data ecosystem is ontology-based digital representations of copper materials. In the current research, we present the methodology and toolchains for the development of domain-level ontologies for materials testing that address the requirements of materials testing standards. The collection of the required terminology from the testing standard, the semantic representation of the process graphs, the conversion of the ontology files, their integration with the upper-level ontologies, and the data mapping processes were presented for the Brinell hardness testing use case. The data integration process was successfully validated by the SPARQL query of the mapped datasets.