Modeling experts, knowledge providers and expertise in Materials Modeling: MAEO as an application ontology of EMMO's ecosystem

This work presents the MarketPlace Agent and Expert Ontology (MAEO), an ontology for modeling experts, expertise, and more broadly, knowledge providers and knowledge seekers for the subject areas of Materials Modeling. MAEO had its inception within the "MarketPlace" European project, whose purpose is to bring about a single entry point for gathering scientific and industrial stakeholders in Materials Modeling. As such, this project aimed to build an online platform where experts and knowledge providers can be searched, found and brought into contact with users, or knowledge seekers, and with one another. MAEO was developed in order to fulfill the requirements of this online platform and thus support it, but is also part of a wider ecosystem of Materials Modeling-related ontologies, at whose core lies the Elementary Multiperspective Material Ontology (EMMO). MAEO is thus an EMMO-compliant application ontology, and has been loosely aligned with a number of existing ontologies, including Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF) and five recently-developed EMMO-based domain ontologies for the classification of materials, models, manufacturing processes, characterization methods and software products related to Materials Modeling. Here, a detailed description of the axiomatization of MAEO and its interconnected ontologies is provided, along with results coming from its deployment and experimentation in a StarDog triplestore.