EMMO: A universal materials science ontology
Now that the 18th European Congress and Exhibition on Advanced Materials and Processes, FEMS EUROMAT 2025, has drawn to a close in Granada, Spain, we reflect on the second of Gerhard’s talks that he gave on Thursday as part of the “Digital materials: rapid materials, experiments, simulation workflows, ontologies and interoperability” session. The talk was entitled: EMMO: an ontology based on universal materials science concepts.
In his talk, Gerhard highlighted that top level ontologies (TLO) involve a stronger commitment to what things are and how they relate to each other than schema. Gerhard introduced EMMO as a TLO committed to a science-based world view, with added common-sense perspectives that enable the same material thing to be described in different ways. He then went on to explain the TLO ISO standard, which provides a way for TLOs to document their commitments to different concepts, such as space and time.
For those just beginning their journey in semantic technologies, Gerhard also introduced EMMO-LITE, a user-friendly version of EMMO with the most widely used concepts for applications in materials sciences that does not require the user to have specific physics or philosophical expertise. Finally, examples from different projects, like BatCAT, were discussed.
For anyone interested in learning more about the differences between schema and ontologies and how the latter offers a more robust, future-compatible solution, we recommend the newsletter article When Standards Fail by John Bittner as part of his series of newsletter called Semantically Speaking.
The EMMC works across Europe in the area of development, validation, adoption and industrial exploitation of materials modelling with a strong focus on digital tools and data, fostering interoperability, and standardisation so enterprises can become more sustainable, competitive and innovative.
EMMO — formally the Elementary Multiperspective Material Ontology — is a top-level ontology framework for materials, their properties, structures, and processes.
Here is a copy of Gerhard’s presentation today:
Or, you can view the presentation here.
Acknowledgement
This work was presented on behalf of the EMMC and has received funding from European Commission under the European Union’s Horizon Research and Innovation programme, GA Nos. 101092211 (CoBRAIN), 101091912 (AID4GREENEST), and 101137725 (BatCAT), and by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee, GA no 10091190 (BatCAT).
