SemanticMaterials - an introduction

A series of articles will be written to share what I, and perhaps others, have discovered about semantic technology and its application to materials, manufacturing and design (MMD).  The series is intended to be instructive to those in the MMD domain, but perhaps those in the data and knowledge management arena will also gain insight into MMD.

Most of my technical experience is in the area of materials development, materials assessment, and structural integrity analysis.  But more recently, I’ve been studying semantic technologies based on World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendations (standards) first published over a decade ago.  While many of the W3C Recommendations are mature, the technology and standards are constantly being extended and revised to take advantage of current trends in the management of knowledge, information and data.

Semantic technologies have several characteristics attractive to the MMD community:

• Tailor-made for machine-to-machine communication
• Works and plays well with other “data” technologies
• Can be used to establish and update the history of facts and observations
• Knowledge, not just data, is captured and managed

The first characteristic represents “low-hanging-fruit” and will be addressed to some degree in the next article.  The second is essential in today’s heterogeneous “data” environment.  The third characteristic has an associated W3C Recommendation and will be explored more thoroughly in future articles.  And while the fourth characteristic is the most challenging, it has been successfully demonstrated by other domains.

Over the course of the next few months some of the topics presented will use a data model conceived of, and under development by, Vinh Nguyen, a PhD candidate at the Kno.e.sis Center.  The singleton property model she presents appears to elegantly address some of the challenges encountered when using semantic technology[1].  Specifically, the singleton property model is an efficient means to associate additional facts or observations with data.

For example, the following statement “The tensile strength of Al 7075-T6 is 572 MPa” can be easily captured using W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF), a framework for representing information on the web.  The singleton property can be used to “fasten” additional facts and observations to the statement:  source of the strength value, statistical attribute (e.g. A-basis, B-basis), associated testing standard, etc.


1.  Vinh Nguyen, Olivier Bodenreider, and Amit Sheth. 2014. Don't like RDF reification?: making statements about statements using singleton property. In Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web (WWW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 759-770. DOI=10.1145/2566486.2567973 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2566486.2567973