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.