A survey on knowledge representation in materials science and engineering: An ontological perspective

• The possible roles of materials ontology are defined in a hierarchical structure.
• The comparison criteria for materials ontologies are proposed.
• The most widely referred nine ontologies are reviewed.
• We compare the reviewed ontologies by the proposed comparison criteria and roles.
• The future challenges of materials ontology are presented.

Informatics in materials science and engineering is playing more and more important role in contemporary society. Intelligent applications such as new materials discovery, materials selection, life prediction, and failure analysis heavily depend on diverse materials information and knowledge. However, most of the existing materials information scatters in different heterogeneous sources without proper interconnections. Therefore, the integration of materials information from heterogeneous sources and transforming them into materials knowledge are of great significance. For this reason, some materials ontologies have emerged, although they may have different motivations and application scenarios. In this paper, we survey the representation of materials knowledge in recent decade especially from an ontological perspective. For better investigation, the possible roles that materials ontology may play are defined in a hierarchical structure, and comparison criteria for the survey are given, which primarily focuses on ontological aspects and materials application aspects, respectively. Then, we review nine selected materials ontologies, and analyze the main features of them. Afterwards, the surveyed materials ontologies are further discussed and compared according to the comparison criteria and roles definition presented by this paper. Finally, the future challenges of materials ontology development and application are discussed.