MATDB ONLINE—A STANDARDS-BASED SYSTEM FOR PRESERVING, MANAGING, AND EXCHANGING ENGINEERING MATERIALS TEST DATA

With ICT Standards playing a key role in support of research and development in many disciplines, the European Commission Institute for Energy and Transport is keen to promote the development and adoption of ICT Standards for engineering data. In this respect, its MatDB Online facility is a Standards-based system for preserving, managing, and exchanging engineering materials test data. While MatDB Online has evolved over more than 30 years to incorporate the latest innovations in data preservation and exchange, such as XML-based data transfer and data citation using digital object identifiers, it continues to rely on a robust data model developed more than 30 years ago through the joint efforts of the National Research Institute for Metals (the predecessor to NIMS, the National Institute for Materials Science), the European Commission Joint Research Centre, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. While this data model has endured over many years, there is no corresponding Standard. Similarly, related efforts by the engineering materials community to deliver a Standard representation for engineering materials, such as MatML, have failed to be ratified. In consequence of the continued absence of a Standard representation for engineering materials data, there is no common mechanism for preserving and exchanging materials data and no formal means of maintaining a data model to support advances in materials technology, such as the emergence of nanomaterials. It is for these reasons that the European Commission Institute for Energy and Transport is supporting SERES, a CEN Workshop on Standards for Electronic Reporting in the Engineering Sector. As one of more than thirty organisations supporting the SERES Workshop, the Institute for Energy and Transport will make the MatDB XML schema available as one of several resources that will be taken into consideration when the prenormative Standard for representing engineering materials data is formulated. With the participation of the Institute for Energy and Transport in the SERES Workshop taking place in parallel with a related project with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, there is good reason to expect that a Standard representation for engineering materials, which has so far eluded the materials community, will be realised. This paper describes MatDB support for engineering materials Standards and related innovative features.JRC.F.4-Nuclear Reactor Integrity Assessment and Knowledge Managemen

Extending the design process into the knowledge of the world

Research initiatives throughout history have shown how a designer typically makes associations and references to a vast amount of knowledge based on experiences to make decisions. With the increasing usage of information systems in our everyday lives, one might imagine an information system that provides designers access to the ‘architectural memories’ of other architectural designers during the design process, in addition to their own physical architectural memory. In this paper, we discuss how the increased adoption of semantic web technologies might advance this idea. We briefly discuss how such a semantic web of building information can be set up, and how this can be linked to a wealth of information freely available in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud

Increasing information feed in the process of structural steel design

Research initiatives throughout history have shown how a designer typically makes associations and references to a vast amount of knowledge based on experiences to make decisions. With the increasing usage of information systems in our everyday lives, one might imagine an information system that provides designers access to the ‘architectural memories’ of other architectural designers during the design process, in addition to their own physical architectural memory. In this paper, we discuss how the increased adoption of semantic web technologies might advance this idea. We investigate to what extent information can be described with these technologies in the context of structural steel design. This investigation indicates significant possibilities regarding information reuse in the process of structural steel design and, by extent, in other design contexts as well. However, important obstacles and question remarks can still be outlined as well

A Proposal on Using Reuse Readiness Levels to Measure Software Reusability

The use of scientific data is becoming increasingly dependent on the software that fosters such use. As the ability to reuse software contributes to capabilities for reusing software-dependent data, instruments for measuring software reusability contribute to the reuse of software and related data. The development and current state of a proposed set of Reuse Readiness Levels (RRLs) are summarized, and potential uses of the software reusability measures are described, along with proposed use cases to support sponsorship of software projects, software production, software adoption, and data stewardship during the systems development lifecycle and the data lifecycle

Semantic Query on Materials Data Based on Mapping MatML to an OWL Ontology

MatML plays an important role in materials data applications while structure-aware query techniques (e.g., XPath and XQuery) are used to search the content of MatML. However, both XPath and XQuery cannot efficiently retrieve sets of MatML on a conceptual level. In this paper, we propose an approach to transform MatML-based materials data into an OWL ontology. As such, materials data can then be explored in a more semantic way. The proposed method formally defines a set of rules to extract the corresponding OWL ontology (named MatOWL) from a given MatML schema. The instance transformation from MatML to MatOWL is implemented with the help of an intermediate object model. The algorithm for instance transformation is also given. Further, MatOWL can be mapped to other ontologies with logic rules to provide more semantic context for domain experts, and more materials knowledge can be obtained by reasoning on the OWL ontology. An experimental prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach