Strategy for Extensible, Evolving Terminology for the Materials Genome Initiative Efforts

Intuitive, flexible, and evolving terminology plays a significant role in capitalizing on recommended knowledge representation models for materials engineering applications. In this article, we present a proposed rules-based approach with initial examples from a growing corpus of materials terms in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Materials Data Repository. Our method aims to establish a common, consistent, and evolving set of rules for creating or extending terminology as needed to describe materials data. The rules are intended to be simple and generalizable for users to understand and extend as well as for groups to apply to their own repositories. The rules generate terms that facilitate machine processing and decision making.