The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) has been constructing a large-scale polymer database, PoLyInfo, for more than 20 years [1]. Comprehensive data on primary structure, higher-order structure, crystal structure, additive information, more than 500,000 properties, polymerization information, etc. forms a polymer ontology. However, environmental impact of plastics has become critical, and materials circulation to reduce consumption has become an important issue. Now, data-driven development of biodegradable plastics requires linking PoLyInfo with biological information. In this study, we created a new polymer-bio ontology that additionally extends the PoLyInfo ontology and links it to the Data and Biological Resource Platform (DBRP)[2].Figure 1. Schema of the plastic biodegradation process (inside the dashed line) and linking to external ontologies.Inside the dashed line in the Figure 1 shows the schema of the plastic biodegradation process (http://dice.nims.go.jp/ontology/polymer-bio-ont/Biodeg#). The biodegradation process was collected from academic journals, and the bibliographic information was linked using a predicate dcterms:referecens. The biodegradation processes managed with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), are expressed with the degraded polymers in PoLyInfo and the degrading bacteria in NCBI using obo:RO_0000057 (has participant), indicating that the digitized plastic biodegradation process is connected to three ontologies (PoLyInfo Ontology, DDBJ Taxonomy Ontology generated from NCBI taxdump files, and Bibliographic Ontology) at the instance level. The class-level diagram (outside the dashed line) defines the degradation process as a subclass of obo:BFO_0000015 (process) in the Basic Formal Ontology, and also synonymously refers to obo:ENVO_06105015 (biodegradation of plastic) in Environment Ontology. Ultimately, we created a digital material core based on the well-known external ontologies.

 The actual instances of plastic biodegradation process are available in turtle-format RDF (https://dice.nims.go.jp/ontology/about.html) and will soon be available on the NIMS public endpoint and The National Bioscience Database Center (NBDC) RDF portal (http://integbio.jp/rdf/). Moreover, we demonstrated database federation with DBRP published by the National Institute of Technology and Evaluation (NITE) through NCBI Taxonomy. PoLyInfo and DBRP can be used as if they were a single knowledge base. In fact, we were able to obtain information on 67 species and 986 strains that degrade polyethylene. This taxonomy application prospect the development of biodegradable polymers and exploration of bacteria using hierarchical classification.