Europeean Materials Modelling Ontology

Version 0.9.10

European Materials Modelling Counsil (EMMC)

January 26, 2020

Abstract:

EMMO is an ontology that is created by the Europeean Materials Modelling Council (EMMC) to provide a formal way to describe the fundamental concepts of physics, chemistry and materials science. EMMO is designed to pave the road for semantic interoperability providing a generic common ground for describing materials, models and data that can be adapted by all domains.

It is a representational framework of predefined classes and axioms (ontology) provided by experts (EMMC) that enables end users (industry, research, academy) to represent real life physical entities (materials, devices), models and properties using ontological signs (individuals) in a standard way to facilitate interactions and exchanges (data, software, knowledge) between all involved material modelling and characterization communities and stakeholders.


Authors:
Emanuele Ghedini, University of Bologne
Gerhard Goldbeck, Goldbeck Consulting
Adham Hashibon, Fraunhofer IWM
Georg Schmitz, ACCESS
Jesper Friis, SINTEF

Content

Introduction

EMMO is a multidisciplinary effort to develop a standard representational framework (the ontology) based on current materials modelling knowledge, including physical sciences, analytical philosophy and information and communication technologies. This multidisciplinarity is illustrated by the figure on the title page. It provides the connection between the physical world, materials characterisation world and materials modelling world.

EMMO provides the connection between the physical world, materials characterisation world and materials modelling world.
EMMO provides the connection between the physical world, materials characterisation world and materials modelling world.

EMMO is based on and is consistent with the Review of Materials Modelling, CEN Workshop Agreement and MODA template. However, while these efforts are written for humans, EMMO is defined using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is machine readable and allows for machine reasoning. In terms of semantic representation, EMMO brings everything to a much higher level than these foundations.

As illustrated in the figure below, EMMO covers all aspects of materials modelling and characterisation, including:

The aspects of materials modelling and characterisation covered by EMMO.
The aspects of materials modelling and characterisation covered by EMMO.

EMMO is released under the Creative Commons license and is available at emmo.info/. The OWL2-DL sources are available in RDF/XML format.

What is an ontology

In short, an ontology is a specification of a conceptualization. The word ontology has a long history in philosophy, in which it refers to the subject of existence. The so-called ontological argument for the existence of God was proposed by Anselm of Canterbury in 1078. He defined God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought”, and argued that “if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality. If it only exists in the mind, then an even greater being must be possible – one which exists both in the mind and in reality”. Even though this example has little to do with todays use of ontologies in e.g. computer science, it illustrates the basic idea; the ontology defines some basic premises (concepts and relations between them) from which it is possible reason to gain new knowledge.

For a more elaborated and modern definition of the ontology we refer the reader to the one provided by Tom Gruber (2009). Another useful introduction to ontologies is the paper Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology by Noy and McGuinness (2001), which is based on the Protege sortware, with which EMMO has been developed.

A taxonomy is a hierarchical representation of classes and subclasses connected via is_a relations. Hence, it is a subset of the ontology excluding all but the is_a relations. The main use of taxonomies is for the organisation of classifications. The figure shows a simple example of a taxonomy illustrating a categorisation of four classes into a hierarchy of more higher of levels of generality.

Example of a taxonomy.
Example of a taxonomy.

In EMMO, the taxonomy is a rooted directed acyclic graph (DAG). This is important since many classification methods relies on this property, see e.g. Valentini (2014) and Robison et al (2015). Note, that EMMO is a DAG does not prevent some classes from having more than one parent. A Variable is for instance both a Mathematical and a Symbol. See appendix for the full EMMO taxonomy.

Primitive elements in EMMO