The application of knowledge representation often comes with the desire to address two fundamental requirements: a) to enable consistency in research and development via a stable, comprehensive and re-usable set of named definitions (vocabulary/thesaurus), which reduces the likelihood that stakeholders talk past each other and b) to enable interoperability across domains in research and development via shared generic high-level concepts, which enables the combination of otherwise disconnected pools of knowledge to foster new findings. These requirements hold true for the Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) domain.

In this presentation, two main improvements that illustrate the evolution of the PMD Core Ontology (PMDco) in the MSE domain are presented: a) how and why migrating from a concise and comprehensive upper level ontology (PROV-O) to a vastly more expressive but also significantly more complex top-level ontology (BFO 2020) is ultimately improving the PMDco’s application potential and b) how the PMDco’s existing capabilities to improve accessibility for MSE experts by lowering technology-related learning curves via intuitive terminology and concepts layouts create new opportunities for innovation and collaboration, by aligning the complex and detailed structures of BFO 2020 with the user-friendly approach of PMDco, thus enhancing the overall understanding and application of ontology frameworks in the MSE domain.