Metadata4Ing: An ontology for describing the generation of research data within a scientific activity.

The ontology Metadata4Ing is developed within the NFDI Consortium NFDI4Ing with the aim of providing a thorough framework for the semantic description of research data, with a particular focus on engineering sciences and neighbouring disciplines. This ontology allows a thorough description of the whole data generation process (experiment, observation, simulation), embracing the object of investigation, all sample and data manipulation procedures, a summary of the data files and the information contained, and all personal and institutional roles. The subordinate classes and relations can be built according to the two principles of inheritance and modularity. Inheritance means that a subclass inherits all properties of its superordinate class, possibly adding some new ones. Modularity means that all expansions are independent of each other; this makes possible for instance to generate expanded ontologies for any possible combinations of method × object of research.

The new version 1.4.0:

• aligns metadata4ing with the SIS ontology to allow for a complete semantic description of numerical quantity values according to the cross domain interoperability framework (#272)
• adds new classes (variable set, configuration) and properties (uses configuration, has fixed parameter (set), has assigned parameter (set)) to allow configuring methods or tools either by reusable fixed parameter sets (like manufacturer sheets) or by a parameterset that is assigned at runtime of a processing step. (#304)
• adds a boolean variable type in addition to numerical and text variables (#305)
• improves the compatibility of the context file with libraries by moving german labels into a separate m4i_context_de.jsonld file (#290)
• improves the compatibility with ontology FAIR checkers by using rdfs:label instead of skos:prefLabel and rdfs:comment instead of skos:definition to name and define the ontology terms (#286)
• fixes syntax errors and non resolving links in First-Steps-Guide and RO-Crate Example (#292, #297)
• fixes inconsistencies and improves labels in the ontology (#309, #308, #302, #295, #294)