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

Abstract

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.

Ontology-Oriented Modeling of the Vickers Hardness Knowledge Graph

“…The knowledge graph of the Vickers hardness test was developed based on the DIN EN ISO 6507-1 standard [15] and in the open-access graphical editing tool of diagrams.net (Drawio) 1 . Here, the Ontopanel library and EntityManager plugins facilitate the knowledge graph development by addressing the related semantic shapes and entities of the upper-level ontologies [16]. The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) 2 , Common Core Ontology (CCO) 3 , Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) 4 , Quantities, Units, Dimensions, and data Types ontologies (QUDT) 5 , Material Science and Engineering Ontology (MSEO) 6 , and mechanical testing ontology (MTO) [17] were utilized as the upper-level ontologies for designing the knowledge graph.…”

The Intersection Between Semantic Web and Materials Science

“…Especially in the creation, collection, and extension of terminology databases, collaboratively used tools could potentially enable a coordinated, standardized, internationalized, and cross‐domain effort. Graphical tools, such as MatVis (Available at https://github.com/Mat-O-Lab/MatVis/) and Ontopanel, [ 53 ] can help MSE domain experts to become familiar with the process of ontology creation more easily while fostering interdisciplinary communication.…”