News

CEN has published a new CEN Workshop Agreement entitled Terminology definition for domain ontologies in materials science.

Materials science and manufacturing generates vast volumes of data that are difficult to find, combine and re-use. Consequently, people and organisations can lose a lot of valuable information and knowledge.

Semantic technologies, like ontologies and knowledge graphs, help by making data easier to bring together, analyse and share. However, developing ontologies can be somewhat challenging task. A top-down is time consuming and requires expert oversight at all levels, whereas a bottom-up approach starts by mapping the data of interest to defined concepts.

A bottom-up approach is attractive, but the difficulty comes when we need to define terminology consistently. Some problem areas include naming conventions, differentiating definitions, noting sources and provenance of descriptions, multiple languages, and quality assurance.

A solid framework

This CEN Workshop Agreement addresses these challenges by providing guidelines and set workflows to identify, define, and maintain terminology for application ontologies in materials science and engineering.

The guidelines support consistent, scalable, and interoperable ontology creation for real datasets, and complements existing terminology standards and ontology best practices.

CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, is an association that brings together the national standardization bodies across 34 European countries. It provides a platform for the development of European Standards and other technical documents in relation to various kinds of products, materials, services and processes.

The CEN Workshop Agreement CWA 18353:2026, officially published as CWA 18353, “Terminology Definition for Domain Ontologies in Materials Science,” by CEN/CENELEC, is available open access from CEN-CENELEC.

Acknowledgement: This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme under Grant Agreement No 101091496. (DiMAT)