Pragmatic Interoperability and Translation of Industrial Engineering Problems into Modelling and Simulation Solutions

Pragmatic interoperability between platforms and service-oriented architectures exists whenever there is an agreement on the roles of participants and components as well as minimum standards for good practice. In this work, it is argued that open platforms require pragmatic interoperability, complementing syntactic interoperability (e.g., through common file formats), and semantic interoperability by ontologies that provide agreed definitions for entities and relations. For consistent data management and the provision of services in computational molecular engineering, community-governed agreements on pragmatics need to be established and formalized. For this purpose, if ontology-based semantic interoperability is already present, the same ontologies can be used. This is illustrated here by the role of the “translator” and procedural definitions for the process of “translation” in materials modelling, which refers to mapping industrial research and development problems onto solutions by modelling and simulation. For associated roles and processes, substantial previous standardization efforts have been carried out by the European Materials Modelling Council (EMMC ASBL). In the present work, the Materials Modelling Translation Ontology (MMTO) is introduced, and it is discussed how the MMTO can contribute to formalizing the pragmatic interoperability standards developed by EMMC ASBL.