Integrating Semantics into Research Data Management: Modelling and Validating Materials Science Experiment Workflows

Abstract

The incorporation of Semantic Web technologies within scientific environments is becoming an increasingly popular Research Data Management (RDM) practice. While ontologies offer flexible, reusable and machine-readable vocabularies to describe domain-specific research data, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) facilitate the integration of heterogeneous data sources into an interoperable collection. Furthermore, KGs offer additional advantages, notably the use of expressive SPARQL queries, or the ability to define complex data validation rules with SHACL. This work describes the modelling of a relational RDM system with an ontology, and the subsequent construction of a KG based on it. Enabled by the highly interconnected nature of research data and experiment workflows present in the system, we not only show how we can easily and reliably build an efficient KG from such domain-specific RDM systems, but also how doing so enables more advanced use cases. This is demonstrated by the modelling of ideal counterparts for the experiment workflows logged in the KG, which are then used to programmatically generate SHACL shapes that fully validate the conformance of the latter. By integrating this functionality within a UI, we allow researchers to plan, reuse, share, and track the progress of their daily experiments.

Preprint of the paper accepted for publication at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2026. The final version will be published by Springer