Emmo

EMMO, the European Materials Modelling Ontology, is a formal ontology designed to provide a coherent, machine-interpretable representation of concepts used in materials science, physics, chemistry, and engineering. It aims to support interoperability among simulation tools, data repositories, and knowledge graphs by offering shared definitions for materials, processes, properties, quantities, models, and experimental data.

The ontology is organized into upper-level and domain-specific modules and is specified in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). It emphasizes precise semantics and formal relations, enabling automated reasoning about material systems, experimental results, and modelling workflows. Its development is community-driven, with contributions from researchers across multiple European institutions, and it is intended to be openly accessible.

EMMO is designed to be domain-agnostic, providing common concepts that allow different modelling approaches to be linked. It supports data annotation, model reuse, and cross-domain data integration, and seeks compatibility with other ontological resources used in the semantic web and knowledge engineering. By defining structured representations of materials, processes, and measurements, it supports data integration and semantic search across diverse sources.

Availability and impact: The ontology is publicly accessible through open repositories and project websites. It has been adopted in European research projects and pilot initiatives that require cross-system data exchange in materials science, facilitating data interoperability and reproducibility in modelling workflows.

See also: ontology, semantic web, knowledge graph, materials modelling.