Work led by Insight at the University of Galway and its partners on an OntoCommons Ecosystem Toolkit for the materials and manufacturing sector has been successfully completed, with the EU-funded OntoCommons project finishing up in October 2023. The aim of this work was to identify gaps and challenges in the development of ontologies and their usage for a better understanding of data, and to produce and validate recommendations for a methodological framework and reference implementation for the development and documentation of these ontologies, updated to fit present challenges in the industry.

During the work led by the University of Galway, a number of focused workshops on ontology development tools and methodologies were held with well over the projected participation, which fed as input to an adapted “Linked Open Terms” ontology development methodology and associated reference implementation set of tools specifically proposed for the OntoCommons target domains. The framework was validated in a variety of application scenarios with project partners such as Tekniker and Bosch.

“We are delighted that a variety of stakeholders have participated in our joint work on producing and validating an integrated ontology development methodology and tools for the the materials and manufacturing domains, ensuring that the outputs from this project are visible and made available to ontology experts across industry, academia, working groups, etc., and even in tangential sectors who may be able to adapt the proposed methodology and tools to their application areas,”  said Prof John Breslin, who worked on the project with Dr Lan Yang (pictured).