MBCO: The Materials-Based Business Case Ontology from BPMN-EMMO Integration

Open innovation in materials research involves the collaborative sharing of knowledge, ideas, and resources across organisations. Unfortunately, a lack of mutual understanding between scientific and industrial partners and their respective domain-specific digital tools hampers collaboration across the two domains. For this purpose, this work integrates the Business Process Modelling and Notation standard BPMN and the Elementary Multi-perspective Material Ontology (EMMO), yielding a knowledge representation and data documentation standard for research problems, workflows, and results related to the development of new materials and technologies and the underlying challenges in materials science. As a methodology, this work proposes and implements an innovative four-step approach for ontology integration, comprising alignment, mapping, integration, and validation. The result of this integration is pioneering an original Materials-based Business Case Ontology (MBCO), by which BPMN can be deployed an EMMO-compliant way.