Materials Graph Ontology

Abstract To maximize the use of the materials data being generated by various researchers and organizations, it is necessary to store the data such that it is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Although current materials data repositories and databases partly address the FAIR principles, they do not adequately capture the critical metadata that represents the contextual information (e.g., relationship between materials data and terms typically used by materials scientists such as process, structure, and property). The collection and organization of this metadata along with the original data would allow advanced queries that implicitly improve FAIR characteristics. Recent work has attempted to define this necessary metadata through the development of materials ontologies. This paper introduces a new materials graph and develops the associated materials graph ontology needed to address shortcomings of the current materials ontologies. This novel ontology can be combined with existing ontologies to standardize the inter-relationships between materials data elements and related materials concepts. This paper demonstrates how the proposed materials graph ontology enables the conceptual description of a broad variety of materials data, improves the findability and usability of the different graph-connected material concepts and data, and formalizes a materials data ingest framework that is amenable for the extraction of process-structure-property relationships.