PMD Ontology Playground

The PMD Ontology Playground is an interactive, community-driven session with a low entry barrier organized by the Platform MaterialDigital (PMD). It is supposed to serve as a collaborative space for:

• Connecting developers and domain experts in materials science and engineering (MSE).

• Discussing and shaping the PMD Core Ontology (PMDco), which is a mid-level ontology designed to describe processes, experiments, and computational workflows for reproducible materials data.

• Hands-on activities, such as ontology modeling, competency questions, and best practices.

• Community feedback and contributions, allowing participants to propose new terms, report issues, and learn ontology development techniques.

As indicated by its denotation, the Ontology Playground is an open and inclusive space allowing both beginners and experts to discuss, collaborate and ask all kinds of questions with respect to aspects of ontologies and semantic technologies.
The PMD Ontology Playground is part of PMD’s broader effort in connecting people to promote FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) in materials data management and to harmonize ontology design across projects and initiatives.

Event

The PMD Ontology Playground is usually held every second Friday, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. CET/CEST (Europe/Berlin).

Kindly be aware that event details may change. Cancellations or rescheduling may occur due to holiday seasons or unexpected situations.

Participation (Subscription / Unsubscription)

To subscribe for the participation in the PMD Ontology Playground (join the participation list), please use the following link and enter your mail and name: https://www.lists.kit.edu/sympa/subscribe/ontology-playground

To unsubscribe from the participation list, do as follows:

• From the Email-Address you want to unsubscribe, send a message to sympa@lists.kit.edu

• In the subject line of your email, type in: unsubscribe ontology-playground

• Leave the message body blank.

Recordings

Some presentations and talks given at the PMD Ontology Playground will be recorded so that they are made available to interested parties afterwards. These are published open access on our PMD YouTube channel.

Please kindly find direct links to a selection of recordings here:

• 2025-09-05 | T. Hanke: Presentation of the PMD Application Ontology creation template for GitHub repositories

• 2025-09-12 | T. Tietz: Presentation on an Introduction to the Ontology Development Kit (ODK) used in PMD GitHub repositories

• 2025-10-17 | T. Bjarsch: To Be FAIR: It’s Not Perfect, But Worth It | Approaches, Lessons Learned & Demos (HybridDigital)

• 2025-12-12 | H. Nasrabadi: Introduction to Vickers Hardness Testing Ontology (VTO)

• 2026-05-29 | T. Bjarsch: MobiDig – An Attempt to Approach Industrial Needs

• 2026-07-10 | T. Hanke: Introducing Ontosphere: A visual tool for ontology and knowledge graph treatment

Furthermore, published presentations are frequently collected in dedicated playlists, such as the PMD Ontology Playground playlist.

Links

Please find further relevant links referring to the PMD Ontology Playground and the PMD project:

• MaterialDigital Homepage

• MaterialDigital GitHub Repo

• PMD Core Ontology (PMDco) repo

• Miro Board for PMD Ontology Playground

Contact

To contact the PMD team regarding issues, suggestions, etc. concerning the ontology playground, please use the Issue Tracker of this repository or send an email to ontology.playground@bam.de.