NFDI MatWerk Ontology (MWO): A BFO‐Compliant Ontology for Research Data Management in Materials Science and Engineering

The growing complexity and heterogeneity of research data in materials science and engineering (MSE) demand structured and interoperable solutions for effective data management and reuse. To address this challenge, this article introduces the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI)-MatWerk Ontology (MWO), as a semantic foundation to standardize metadata, link distributed datasets, and support digital research data management (RDM) in MSE. MWO addresses the need for the structured, standardized, and semantically rich representation of key entities, processes, and resources involved in the generation, sharing, and reuse of MSE research data. Aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) , MWO develops as a modular extension of the NFDIcore ontology, and reuses Platform MaterialDigital core ontology (PMDco) MWO offers broad semantic coverage, modeling elements such as researchers, organizations, projects, software, workflows, datasets, metadata schemas, instruments, events, and services. It supports modular, scalable development through ontology design patterns (ODPs) and is maintained via the Ontology Development Kit (ODK) following best practices from the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. ... mehrMWO also serves as the foundation for the MSE Knowledge Graph (MS-KG), which integrates semantically interlinked research data across the NFDI-MatWerk consortium and wider MSE community.