COMAT: core ontology of matter

Abstract

Purpose

Matter is an important topic of science as a discipline since its inception. Nevertheless, along with the evolution of semantic web, matter has got equal importance among the ontology developers. The current work describes an ontology of matter that the authors developed in the lab. The purpose of this paper is to come up with an exhaustive list of concepts and relations to cover matter domain under one umbrella, after identifying the gaps in the present ontologies.

Design/methodology/approach

Ontology was developed following faceted analytico-synthetic approach of knowledge organization. The authors followed hybrid developmental approach which includes top-down as well as bottom-up development strategy, for creating classes and subclasses. The authors modelled matter domain comprehensively considering different aspects of matter. The theories behind the modelling approach helps to maintain the consistency of further extensions.

Findings

Final ontology has around 280 concepts and as many as 60 properties which include both object property and datatype property.

Research limitations/implications

There exists very vague definition of concepts in different subject areas, as matter is a domain of study in physics, chemistry, material science, metallurgy, etc. Same material has been adopted differently depending upon purpose of its study/use in that field. For example aspirin is simply a chemical compound in chemistry, whereas in medicine it is also an agent.

Practical implications

Present work claims to influence the ontology engineers to develop more extension to this core ontology of matter (COMAT). Also this will find its use in information retrieval, semantic annotations and in several other semantic knowledge-based systems.

Originality/value

COMAT is the most recent work of the domain. Originality lies in the way matter domain has been looked up, from a very wide perspective, as well as in the approach of modelling the domain.

Citation

Madalli, D., Sulochana, A. and Singh, A.K. (2016), "COMAT: core ontology of matter", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 50 No. 1, pp. 103-117. https://doi.org/10.1108/PROG-01-2015-0002