PRIMA Ontology

The Metadata WG, the NFFA-Europe Pilot (NEP), EOSC-Pillar and the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) co-developed the PRIMA (PRovenance Information for MAterials science) Ontology, an ontology of high-level terms based on the MDMC Glossary and aligned with PROV-O. The ontology contains high-level provenance information to describe or annotate the entire experimental workflow.

The ontology is planned to be extended thanks to the adoption of fine-grained ontologies already existing, e.g. the Material Science Lab Equipment (MSLE) Ontology. In future, the ontology might also be adopted by other Materials Science projects, with the huge advantage of having a common description of concepts and relationships in the domain of Materials Science. This will offer a set of metadata which, in turn, will increase the interoperability and the reuse of data.

The Figure shows the graphical representation of the ontology. The implementation and the competency questions can be found on the GitHub page

Use case 1: Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM)

The MDMC-NEP PROV Ontology was applied to the STM use case, described in this paper. The result of the mapping is an ontology instantiation (shown in the Figure below) in the triples format (RDF)/provenance graph. “mno” (MDMC-NEP Prov Ontology) is used as a prefix.