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A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | A P R I L 2 0 1 6
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selected universities, helping to prepare
the futureworkforce formaterials design.
This work has not yet reached the
tipping point in terms of building a Se-
mantic Web framework as the founda-
tion for achieving the first three goals
of the MGI Strategic Plan to begin wide-
spread adoption.
The Metadata Research Center at
Drexel University is gaining momen-
tum with its open-source project called
HIVE (helping interdisciplinary vocab-
ulary engineering)[14]. HIVE presents
an automatic linked open data (LOD)
technology that integrates interdisci-
plinary semantic ontologies encoded
with the Simple Knowledge Organiza-
tion System (SKOS), a W3C standard.
Researchers initially focused on metals,
and are currently “training” HIVE across
materials science by working with a
group of selected articles and keywords
assigned by domain experts (the gold
standard), and enhancing HIVE’s on-
tology indexing via machine learning
algorithms.
OTHER ACTIVITIES
A semantic framework is being de-
veloped though the U.S. Department of
Defense Small Business Innovative Re-
search (SBIR) program. The Materials
and Manufacturing Directorate of the
U.S. Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Day-
ton, is managing a project to develop
the foundational elements of a seman-
tic technology for materials design and
development. A robust mid-level ma-
terials ontology is being developed,
ready for crowdsourcing and initial ex-
perimental research use. The project
aims to significantly expand integration
across data stores, demonstrating com-
putational approaches for establishing
provenance and processing restricted
linked materials data and information.
AFRL awarded a contract to a pri-
vate firm to buildMatOnto, a comprehen-
sive semantic platform that links data,
processes, and applications together
into a domain-specific conceptual view
for materials. MatOnto’s Stephen Kah-
mann explains their
distributed architec-
ture and open-license
approach. “A semantic
web behaves like an
ecosystem that sup-
ports long-term or-
ganic growth through
adoption and emer-
gent use patterns. It is
not realistic to apply
commercial concepts
such as licensing and
transaction-based fees.
We are simply creating
a framework where the
community can share
data securely and pri-
vately, and make their
own decisions about
licensing content,” says
Kahmann. With the first
release of the platform
targeted for Q1 2016,
MatOnto provides a de-
centralized, federated,
and distributed frame-
work to publish and
discover data, services,
and computational functions (analytics)
that are instantly consumable. This en-
ables thematerials-design community to
organize, relate, digest, and synthesize
the vast amount of materials data. For
more information, visit .
To realize the benefits envisioned
by the Materials Genome Initiative, scien-
tists should work through their corporate
channels and with industry organizations
such as ASM International to pursue and
fund semantic data solutions. With a
proper semantic foundation, the MGI can
achieve its goal to discover, manufacture,
and deploy advanced materials twice as
fast, at a fraction of the cost. ~AM&P
For more information: Sam Chance
is a semantic technologist, iNovex In-
formation Systems, 7640 Parkway Dr.
#140, Hanover, MD 21076, 443.782.1452,
, -
.
References
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2. T. Flew, New Media: An Introduction
(3rd ed.), Oxford University Press, Mel-
bourne, p 19, 2008.
3. T. Berners-Lee, The Semantic Web,
Sci. Amer., May, 2001.
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8. F. Belleau, et al., Bio2rdf: Towards a
Mashup to Build Bioinformatics Knowl-
edge Systems, J. Biomed. Informatics,
41(5), p 706-16, 2008, .
9. D. Amerland, Google Semantic
Search, Que Publishing Co., 2013.
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