
The “Workshop on Interoperability in Materials Modelling” took place in Cambridge on November 7-8, 2017 and presented a wide range of stakeholder communities, including academic and commercial materials modelling software owners, manufacturing industry , modellers covering different types of models and applications, repository owners , academic and commercial data and science/informatics software owners/consultants . It also brought together a number of current EU projects, the three DGCNECT COEs in the materials modelling field (NOMAD, MAX, E-CAM) and EUDAT .
The objective of the workshop was for EMMC to seek the support of and endorsement by the wider materials modelling community for the European Materials Modelling Ontology (EMMO). EMMC is also gathering requirements and outlining plans for interoperability between data repositories and marketplaces.
The major outcome of the workshop was the wide agreement on the need for ontologies in materials modelling. Moreover, there was a call for an integrated effort to develop ontologies for the whole field, including materials characterisation and modelling all the way to chemicals and materials development in industry. Such a development is regarded as key to success in digitalisation. The draft EMMO was well received and its current development was widely endorsed. The status, requirements, expectations, benefits, as well as potential pitfalls of ontologies were discussed in detail. The need for a common semantic basis and hence ontologies that drive the marketplace platform that will link all stakeholders (providers and buyers) and integrate translation and decision support was highlighted. There is good evidence that the Use of the RoMM terminology during communication about modelling and simulation is spreading well beyond EU projects. Finally, there is good evidence that the Documentation of simulations using MODA is now widely endorsed and is supporting communication and the development of the MODA portal.