OntoCommons is a EU project dedicated to supporting a Digital Single Market across all domains related to materials and manufacturing.

OntoCommons lays the foundation for standardised data documentation to facilitate data sharing and to push data-driven innovation in in the materials and manufacturing sectors. As well as creating a framework for the development of a Digital Single Market for the sector, the project aims to nurture new business models for European industry while exploiting the opportunities of digitalisation and addressing sustainability challenges.

The Ontology Commons EcoSystem (OCES) is a set of ontologies (or a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them) and tools that follows specific standardisation rules. This provides a sustainable approach, making the data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). Moreover, the OCES implements practical and user-friendly mechanisms for the materials and manufacturing sectors.

Ontocommons involves a wide range of EU stakeholders including subject matter experts (e.g. material scientists), ontologists (e.g. philosophers, semantic web experts), implementers (e.g. database experts), industrial end users (e.g. manufacturers) and application developers. The project covers a wide range of areas including Nanotechnologies, Advanced Materials, Biotechnology and Advanced Manufacturing and Processing application domains.

Professor John Breslin (pictured) and the Insight SFI Centre at the University of Galway are the Horizon 2020 CSA project workpackage leaders for activities around the OntoCommons ecosystem toolkit, which is putting together this comprehensive ontology design methodology and associated set of tools for the manufacturing and materials domains.