A Concise Ontological Model of the Design and Optoelectronic Properties in the Quantum Cascade Laser Domain

Terahertz quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) are semiconductor laser devices that operate in the far infrared range (frequency range from about 100 GHz to 10 THz). QCL properties can be categorized as follows: design of the laser (heterostructure properties capturing the various materials used in the laser structure and the various laser design types) and the laser Optoelectronic properties (laser performance behavior as a result of injection of current into the laser device). Maintaining ontologies with this information is useful in supporting data mining activities that seek to retrieve useful information on the various QCL designs and their respective performance, together with provenance information. This provides a platform to share and interact with QCL data by both machines and humans in a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable manner. The existing ontologies in the material design domain do not capture this crucial information. This is due to a lack of formal definitions for the QCL property concepts. In this paper, we address the issue of formal representation of the specified QCL properties and the relationships among them. We propose a semantically enriched ontological model of properties in the QCL domain. We evaluate the ability of ontological representation to model the QCL properties using an inheritance richness metric-based evaluation and the ontology validation technique. Experimental evaluation indicates the consistency of the ontology, its ability to answer 100% of the competency questions by QCL domain experts, and an inheritance richness metric of 0.133, indicating a detailed level of the ontology in capturing the domain requirements.