Ontopanel: A Tool for Domain Experts Facilitating Visual Ontology Development and Mapping for FAIR Data Sharing in Materials Testing

• Published in: Integrating materials and manufacturing innovation Vol. 11; no. 4; pp. 545 - 556
• Main Authors: Chen, Yue, Schilling, Markus, von Hartrott, Philipp, Nasrabadi, Hossein Beygi, Skrotzki, Birgit, Olbricht, Jürgen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01.12.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Brinell hardness; Brinell hardness tests; Characterization and Evaluation of Materials; Chemistry and Materials Science; Data management; Digitization; Domains; Editing; Hardness tests; Knowledge representation; Mapping; Materials Science; Materials testing; Metallic Materials; Nanotechnology; Ontology; Programming languages; Structural Materials; Subject specialists; Surfaces and Interfaces; Technical Article; Thin Films; Web Ontology Language-OWL; Materials testing; Ontology; FAIR; Data mapping; Visual ontology development
• ISSN: 2193-9764; 2193-9772; 2193-9772
• DOI: 10.1007/s40192-022-00279-y

In recent years, the design and development of materials are strongly interconnected with the development of digital technologies. In this respect, efficient data management is the building block of material digitization and, in the field of materials science and engineering (MSE), effective solutions for data standardization and sharing of different digital resources are needed. Therefore, ontologies are applied that represent a map of MSE concepts and relationships between them. Among different ontology development approaches, graphical editing based on standard conceptual modeling languages is increasingly used due to its intuitiveness and simplicity. This approach is also adopted by the Materials-open-Laboratory project (Mat-o-Lab), which aims to develop domain ontologies and method graphs in accordance with testing standards in the field of MSE. To suit the actual demands of domain experts in the project, Ontopanel was created as a plugin for the popular open-source graphical editor diagrams.net to enable graphical ontology editing. It includes a set of pipeline tools to foster ontology development in diagrams.net, comprising imports and reusage of ontologies, converting diagrams to Web Ontology Language (OWL), verifying diagrams using OWL rules, and mapping data. It reduces learning costs by eliminating the need for domain experts to switch between various tools. Brinell hardness testing is chosen in this study as a use case to demonstrate the utilization of Ontopanel .