Semantic Representation of Processes with Ontology Design Patterns

The representation of workflows and processes is essential in materials science and engineering, where reproducibility depends on structured and semantically coherent process models. Although many ontologies exist for process modeling, they often remain complex and difficult to reuse. This work identifies and evaluates reusable Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) embedded in existing ontologies relevant to scientific workflows and materials engineering. It defines three domain-specific requirements—process structure, data & resources, and project roles—and proposes a baseline method for automatic ODP extraction using semantic similarity and modular ontology techniques. All extracted ODPs and the extraction workflow are openly available at https://github.com/ISE-FIZKarlsruhe/odps4mse.