Representing MSE Research Metadata Using the NFDI MatWerk Ontology: Patterns and Use cases

NFDI-MatWerk (National Research Data Infrastructure for Materials Science and Engineering) is a German initiative focused on developing a digital infrastructure that integrates decentralized data, metadata, workflows, and a materials ontology to improve interoperability and reproducibility in materials science and engineering (MSE) research data processing. The NFDI MatWerk Ontology (MWO) is a unified framework developed by the Task Area Ontologies for Materials Science (TA-OMS) within the NFDI-MatWerk initiative. Its primary goal of MWO is to standardize the representation of materials data, ensuring consistency and interoperability across diverse datasets and research activities. By creating structured vocabularies and frameworks, MWO facilitates efficient data discovery, integration, and reuse, thereby enhancing researchers' ability to find, share, and utilize materials data effectively. The newest version of MWO (V3.0.0) has been mapped to the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and NFDIcore ontologies and integrated well with Platform MaterialDigital Core Ontology (PMDco v3.0.0). This talk showcases example ontology design patterns (ODPs) developed using MWO and their application in representing practical MSE-based use cases, highlighting their capacity to enable scalable, reusable, and semantically robust knowledge frameworks. ODPs are reusable and modular components that encapsulate best practices for solving common challenges in ontology development, thus help domain experts and developers to create consistent, efficient, and extensible ontologies. The example structural, content-based, and presentation ODPs were designed to define foundational arrangements of entities, address domain-specific knowledge, and optimize user interaction with ontologies. To illustrate the practical utility of ODPs, we presented several use cases within the MSE domain, such as representing metadata for materials, instruments, large-scale facilities, researchers, organizations, educational events, resources, datasets, data portals, and material research software. Through these cases, we emphasize how ODPs facilitate development by offering standardized templates for tasks such as hierarchy modeling, semantic relationship management, and data source integration, while also supporting ontology-driven solutions that are technically sound and adaptable to changing domain requirements.