The Wet-Chemical Syntheses (WeChemSyn) Ontology (WCSO) provides a semantic framework for the structured representation of knowledge related to the production of (nano)particles by wet chemical synthesis. Developed at the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM) / Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing in Berlin, Germany, WCSO supports the formalization, integration, and consistent reuse of wet chemical synthesis descriptions and nanoparticle-related data across experimental workflows, synthesis processes, and Self-Driving Labs.
The ontology and examples (node graphs and knowledge graphs based on the ontology) in this repositopry are explained in detail in the following publication:
Markus Schilling, Harald Bresch, Bernd Bayerlein, Bastian Rühle, WeChemSynOntology: Semantic Modeling of Wet Chemical Syntheses in a Self-Driving Lab for Nano-and Advanced Materials, Digital Discovery, 2026, DOI: 10.1039/D6DD00058D
If you find this work useful and use any of the files, data, or code in your own work, please cite the above article.
WCSO builds upon the PMD Core Ontology (PMDco), a mid-level ontology developed within the Platform MaterialDigital (PMD) project and grounded in the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). By adhering to BFO as its foundational ontology, WCSO ensures semantic interoperability with a wide range of BFO-aligned ontologies and knowledge graphs, both within and beyond the materials science and engineering domain, thereby supporting data-driven and automated research workflows.
Technical documentation of the ontology is available at: https://w3id.org/wcso
A complementary documentation optimized for human readability can be found at: https://BAMresearch.github.io/wcso/docs/
The latest version (latest release) of the ontology can always be found at:
Editors of this ontology should use the edit version, src/ontology/wcso-edit.owl
Please use this GitHub repository's Issue tracker to request new terms/classes or report errors or specific concerns related to the ontology.
When using wcso, please cite it as:
Markus Schilling, Harald Bresch, Bernd Bayerlein, Bastian Rühle., WeChemSynOntology: Semantic Modeling of Wet Chemical Syntheses in a Self-Driving Lab for Nano-and Advanced Materials, Digital Discovery, 2026, DOI: 10.1039/D6DD00058D
AND
Markus Schilling, Harald Bresch, Bernd Bayerlein, Bastian Rühle. (January 31st, 2026) WCSO: Wet-Chemical Syntheses (WeChemSyn) Ontology. Version 1.0.0, https://w3id.org/wcso
This ontology repository was created using the Ontology Development Kit (ODK).