Development of an ontology for the lifecycle of copper and copper alloys

Efforts towards digitalization in the material science and technology community have enhanced in
the last years. In 2019 the German digitalization initiative platform „MaterialDigital“ (MD) has been
started. Numerous projects concerning digitalization, including the copper related project
„KupferDigital“ (copper digital) have been initiated under the umbrella of MD. The initiative strives to
address numerous issues concerning data access, exchange, security, provenance and sovereignty.

Heterogeneous data origin, storage and evaluation often result in problems concerning comparability
and reproducibility of scientific and technological results. In many cases material data are recorded,
but the methods of testing are insufficiently described, or such information is not communicated
along with the raw data. The material data can also have numerous different formats such as paper
printouts, pdfs, excel sheets or csv-files. Hence, gathering and integrating material data from
different sources is challenging for potential users like materials scientists and engineers, especially if
there are contradictory data where the reasons for contradictions is not clear due their vague
description.

In order to address these problems, data should comply to the so called „FAIR“ principle which calls
for data to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) and hence be accessible via
so-called decentralized but interconnected data spaces. By using knowledge representation with
ontologies, data can be enriched with meaning and the methods of the testing procedures can be
accurately provided.

In this presentation we want to introduce our approach to such knowledge representation based on
a high-throughput alloy development process for Cu-based alloys along with characterization
techniques such as hardness testing and microstructural characterization (e.g. EBSD – Electron
Backscattered Diffraction).